My mum always said “If Saint John’s bells ring, you’ll be stuck like this” whenever we were making faces or picking our noses, so we’d be afraid of doing it (didn’t work much). I guess it’s a regional thing, since my mum regularly uses words/sayings from her birthplace, but this one i never heard even at her place, and cannot find it on internet.
I read a french childrens book about this, so it’s definitely more withspread.
Edit: could have been Swedish, it was a long time ago (the kid gets stuck as the wind changed and the bell rang, finally unstuck at the end of the book, does another face and gets re-stuck IIRC).
My mum always said “If Saint John’s bells ring, you’ll be stuck like this” whenever we were making faces or picking our noses, so we’d be afraid of doing it (didn’t work much). I guess it’s a regional thing, since my mum regularly uses words/sayings from her birthplace, but this one i never heard even at her place, and cannot find it on internet.
For us it was “if the wind changes, you’ll be stuck like that”
I read a french childrens book about this, so it’s definitely more withspread.
Edit: could have been Swedish, it was a long time ago (the kid gets stuck as the wind changed and the bell rang, finally unstuck at the end of the book, does another face and gets re-stuck IIRC).
Oh could be just a variation on a tale then. The wind version definitely exists in english apparently, i can’t find it in french.
I found this disproportionately funny because I used to live near a St John’s that had bells that would ring multiple times per day
I know this one too from The Netherlands. But here it was just “when the bell tolls”