The clinic door banged open and in came a spotty girl and a man, with a stretcher between them. Another man was lying face down on the stretcher with what looked like a large brown accident stuck on his back. Mr Peter was speechless.
‘It’s me dachshund, Chantelle,’ said the girl with a sniff. ‘She’s stuck again.’
I was rammed against the bars of my cage, trying to work out what had been going on. It was quite a puzzle. I could just about see a splattered sausage shape spread across the man’s back, but that was all.
‘Wuff,’ said the splatter shape.
‘She went for me,’ complained the man on the stretcher. ‘Wasn’t my fault. She leaped on my back and now she’s stuck there.’
Mr Peter ran his fingers over the back of the man’s coat. ‘Good heavens! Your coat’s made of Velcro!’
‘That’s right. I’m known as Mr Gecko. I run a fairground attraction. You wear Velcro pads and hurl yourself at the wall and stick there, like a fly. I was getting ready for a demonstration event when this hairy sausage comes hurtling across the field and leaps up at me. I turned my back on her and now she’s stuck there. Stupid animal!’
‘She thought you were a rabbit,’ sniffed the girl.
A rabbit? I fell off my perch, laughing. I couldn’t help it. I just lay on my back on the floor of my cage, plucking the air helplessly with my claws and gasping for breath.
‘Do I look like a rabbit?’ demanded the man on the stretcher.
‘I meant a squirrel.’
A squirrel? Oh, please! Someone help me! I was dying of laughter. I thought I’d shake every feather from my body. Even Mr Peter was desperately trying to keep a straight face.
‘Well, you’re definitely like a hedgehog,’ the girl went on defiantly.
‘Wuff,’ went the claggy brown mess.
Mr Peter fetched a pair of scissors. He helped the man to sit up and began to cut the dog free. ‘I’m afraid her coat will look a bit of a mess for a while, but in time it will grow back.’ At last he lifted the dog clear. What a sight! She had semi-bald patches all over her. The girl gave Mr Gecko a haughty glare, sniffed loudly and swept from the room.
‘They’re a right pair, they are,’ muttered Mr Gecko. He scowled across at me. ‘What’s that bird doing? Is she laughing?’
Laughing? Oh yes! I laughed so much I wet myself. Excusez-moi!
Tail-piece:
No animals (or humans) were hurt
during the writing of this story.
Jeremy Strong once worked in a bakery, putting the jam into three thousand doughnuts every night. Now he puts the jam in stories instead, which he finds much more exciting. At the age of three, he fell out of a first-floor bedroom window and landed on his head. His mother says that this damaged him for the rest of his life and refuses to take any responsibility. He loves writing stories because he says it is ‘the only time you alone have complete control and can make anything happen’. His ambition is to make you laugh (or at least snuffle). Jeremy Strong lives near Bath with his wife, Gillie, four cats and a flying cow.
Jeremy Strong once worked in a bakery, putting the jam into three thousand doughnuts every night. Now he puts the jam in stories instead, which he finds much more exciting. At the age of three, he fell out of a first-floor bedroom window and landed on his head. His mother says that this damaged him for the rest of his life and refuses to take any responsibility. He loves writing stories because he says it is ‘the only time you alone have complete control and can make anything happen’. His ambition is to make you laugh (or at least snuffle). Jeremy Strong lives near Bath with his wife, Gillie, four cats and a flying cow.
Are you feeling silly enough to read more?
BATPANTS!
THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS (a Cosmic Pyjamas adventure)
THE BEAK SPEAKS
BEWARE! KILLER TOMATOES
CARTOON KID
CHICKEN SCHOOL
CHRISTMAS CHAOS FOR THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
DINOSAUR POX
DOCTOR BONKERS! (a Cosmic Pyjamas adventure)
GIANT JIM AND THE HURRICANE
THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG GOES FOR GOLD
KRANKENSTEIN’S CRAZY HOUSE OF HORROR
(A Cosmic Pyjamas Adventure)
KRAZY COW SAVES THE WORLD – WELL, ALMOST
LOST! THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
MY BROTHER’S FAMOUS BOTTOM
MY BROTHER’S HOT CROSS BOTTOM
THERE’S A PHARAOH IN OUR
BATH!
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF JOKE BOOK
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF
EVEN MORE JOKE BOOK
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF CLASSROOM
CHAOS JOKE BOOK
Are you feeling silly enough to read more?
BATPANTS!
THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS (a Cosmic Pyjamas adventure)
THE BEAK SPEAKS
BEWARE! KILLER TOMATOES
CARTOON KID
CHICKEN SCHOOL
CHRISTMAS CHAOS FOR THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
DINOSAUR POX
DOCTOR BONKERS! (a Cosmic Pyjamas adventure)
GIANT JIM AND THE HURRICANE
THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG GOES FOR GOLD
KRANKENSTEIN’S CRAZY HOUSE OF HORROR
(A Cosmic Pyjamas Adventure)
KRAZY COW SAVES THE WORLD – WELL, ALMOST
LOST! THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG
MY BROTHER’S FAMOUS BOTTOM
MY BROTHER’S HOT CROSS BOTTOM
THERE’S A PHARAOH IN OUR
BATH!
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF JOKE BOOK
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF
EVEN MORE JOKE BOOK
JEREMY STRONG’S LAUGH-YOUR-SOCKS-OFF CLASSROOM
CHAOS JOKE BOOK
Tail-piece:
No animals (or humans) were hurt
during the writing of this story.
Dogs! Useless creatures. Brains like porridge. And the one at the vet’s clinic was an excellent example of just how useless a dog could be. When I saw that bit of plastic water pipe I laughed so much I nearly fell out of my bird cage. The tube had been brought in by a spotty girl and she placed it carefully on the examination table.
‘What have we got here?’ asked Mr Peter. (He’s the vet and my hero. Oh yes, just you wait and see!)
‘It’s me dog,’ the girl answered with a sniff. (It wasn’t an upset kind of sniff – more of a sniffy sniff, like her nose was blocked and she didn’t have a hanky.)
‘A dog?’ mused Mr Peter, and there was a muffled ‘wuff’ from deep inside.
The girl nodded. ‘Ran in there after a rabbit, didn’t she? Rabbit came out the other end, but the dog didn’t. Stuck in there, isn’t she?’ Sniff.
That sniffing was getting on my nerves. I wanted to shove one wing under her nose and say, ‘For heaven’s sake, blow!’ But Mr Peter was all patience.
‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ he said, lifting one end of the tube and peering down it.
Sniff. ‘That’s ’er back end.’
‘So I see,’ said Mr Peter. ‘Good thing I’ve had five years of training to spot things like that. OK, here is what I’m going to do. This is a bottle of cooking oil. I’m going to dribble this down the inside lining of the tube to make it nice and slippery like so, and we leave it a few moments for the oil to work right the way down. There we are, and now we give the tube a little shake and whoops! Out comes Fido!’
‘’Er name’s Chantelle,’ sniffed the girl.
Chantelle? Ooh la la! Manky Mophead would have been a better name. Do you know what came out of that tube? It wasn’t a dog. It was a long, thin mess of tangled, slimy fur that just so happened to have four tiddly legs, a silly tiddly head at one end and an excuse for a tiddly tail at the other. It was a long-haired dachshund – you know, a sausage dog – and boy, did it look daft! Oh yes!
But then dogs are often like that, aren’t they? They’ve no pride, no sense of style at all. Me, I’m the Style Queen.
It’s because I’m a mynah bird. Mynah birds have natural finesse. Finesse – that’s French, you know. It means good taste and elegance. I’m well educated, you see – I speak a bit of French, a bit of English – shows how cultured I am. Mynah birds are famous for speaking well, and I’m one of the best.
‘Good evening, sir. Dinner will be served in the dining-cage at eight.’ See? That’s posh talk, that is. Mynahs don’t do any of that awful screechy-squawky ‘’Allo!’ business you get from parrots. Parrots are rubbish, but mynah birds, we’re something different. We’ve got style. Oh yes.
Unlike this dachshund, which was slithering about on the table trying to stand up but failing because every surface was covered with cooking oil. I couldn’t help laughing. Well, it was funny! I was in hysterics, hanging upside down from my perch and banging my head on the cage floor.
‘I have done many strange things in my animal clinic,’ explained Mr Peter, ‘but I’ve never had to shake a dog out of a tube before.’
The girl sniffed again and tried to pick up Chantelle. ‘Urgh. She’s all gunky.’
‘Wipe her over with a towel when you get home. She’ll be as right as rain in no time. Just don’t let her fall on the barbecue.’
‘What?’
‘Joke,’ explained Mr Peter.
‘Joke?’ Sniff.
‘Never mind,’ sighed Mr Peter. ‘Bye-bye.’
‘Wuff,’ said the dog.
‘Don’t swear,’ said Mr Peter. I was on my back in my cage, kicking my legs in the air and screaming with laughter. The girl glanced across at me.
‘That bird all right or is she choking on something?’
‘Dinah likes to show off,’ said Mr Peter.
The liar! The great big liar! I do NOT show off. AND I HATE BEING CALLED DINAH! What a daft name. Dinah the Mynah, I ask you! I could see that dachshund smirking at me too. Stupid dog.
I hate dogs. They think they’re so clever, just because they can run and jump and fetch sticks and stuff. I mean, what use is that? Just suppose I went flying off, got a stick and brought it back for you. I put it down at your feet and I say, ‘There you are, I’ve brought you a stick, look.’
And you’d say: ‘What do I want a stick for?’
And I’d say: ‘I dunno.’
And you’d say: ‘I dunno, either. Go and put it back.’
You see what I mean? What are sticks for? They’re for trees, that’s what. Trees have sticks on them and what I say is, leave them there. Dogs are just stupid.
Mr Peter’s a good vet. I owe my life to him. He saved me from almost certain death. Oh yes. My previous life was terrible. I was being held prisoner by animal smugglers. They kept all these animals locked away in stinking cages, waiting to be sold. Like slaves, we were. I managed to escape from my cage, but I couldn’t get out of the room. Want to know what they used to catch me? A vacuum cleaner.
That’s right! They sucked me right up it. SHLOPP! I disappeared backwards up the tube. Have you ever heard a squawk in reverse? It goes sort of KWAUQS! Sounded like I’d swallowed a cork. It took off most of my feathers. But when they opened up the machine I skedaddled like my bottom was on fire! I whizzed out through the door and took to the air.
It was a nightmare. My feathers were falling out all the time and I was losing power and eventually I just couldn’t keep going. I went into a nosedive (actually it was more of a beak-dive) and – Spladdash! – I plunged straight into Mr Peter’s garden pond. That was a stroke of luck!
He rescued me. I didn’t have many feathers left. I was all in the nuddy, and me the Style Queen! The shame of it. But the feathers grew back eventually and he’s looked after me ever since. I still have nightmares about that other place, but I’m safe now, with Mr Peter and his children.
Mark and Tamsin are great. They give me loads of nibbly things to eat when Mr Peter isn’t looking, and they let me out of the cage much more than he does.
Mark’s the oldest. He takes life very seriously, but he looks like an idiot – and I mean that in the nicest possible way. You can never be sure what he’s going to appear as. He’s mad about animals, like his dad. He spent all last week pretending he was an archerfish, squirting jets of water at flies. He got soaked. Tammy got soaked. I got soaked. Mr Peter got soaked … and then rather cross.
This week Mark is busy being a leopard. He’s dyed his blond hair with leopard spots. He goes creeping about the place, sneaking behind the chairs and then pouncing on people.
Mr Peter spilled his dinner last night when Mark suddenly ambushed him from under the table. Mr Peter was not pleased, surprise, surprise.
‘I’m a leopard, Dad. I’ve got to practise my hunting skills.’
‘Well, now you can be a leopard cleaning the carpet.’
‘I don’t think leopards clean carpets in the wild,’ Mark pointed out.
‘Well, if this leopard doesn’t clean this carpet, this leopard is going to be in very big trouble. Does this leopard understand?’
So the leopard cleaned the carpet.
But the real reason why Mark is so serious, despite his leopard-spot hair, is because of his dad, Mr Peter. (Full name: Peter Draper, Veterinary Surgeon, of the Small Paws Animal Clinic – there, now you’ve been properly introduced.) Mark and Tammy haven’t got a mum, you see. She went off to America with someone else. Mr Peter says she flew there, but he must be making that up. She had such thin arms – she’d never even have taken off, let alone flown. Ha ha. Mynah joke.
Mark and Tamsin only get to see her about once a year. They were pretty cut up about it, but they’ve settled down a lot. It happened about two years ago and now Mark reckons he’s got to look after his dad. He talks to me a lot, you see – that’s how I know. He says he’s second-in-command.
‘There’s nobody else to look after him,’ he told me. ‘It’s all down to me, and I know what’s wrong.’ He thinks I don’t understand what he says, but of course I do. I mean, I don’t just have style, I’m intelligent too.
I just looked at him. Sometimes it’s best to keep quiet, especially if you’re a bird. People don’t expect you to say anything too brainy. If you do, they come over all funny. I kept quiet and waited to hear what he’d say next.
‘What Dad needs is a girlfriend.’
‘SQUAAA
**&%*WKKK!’
OK, so maybe that wasn’t a very intelligent thing to say, but I was shocked. I was thinking, hang on, chum, you can’t go around picking up girlfriends for people, especially not for your own dad! But Mark was serious. I couldn’t believe it.
‘He can share his work with her and he’ll have someone to talk to. Tammy can have a new mum and she can come and live here and she can make custard without lumps for us, because Dad’s always has lumps in it, Dinah, you know it does.’
That last bit was true enough, but I still thought it was a bit much. Just because you don’t want lumps in your custard doesn’t mean you can go round grabbing girlfriends for your dad, does it? Anyhow, what was Mark planning to do? Was he going to put all girlfriends through a custard-making test before he allowed them anywhere near his dad?
The thing is, when Mark gets serious about something it’s time to watch out. Every now and then he gets these Bright Ideas, and if it’s not Mark thinking of something, it’s that crazy friend of his, Sanjeev. (It was Sanjeev who put the leopard spots on Mark’s hair.) The problem is that Mark’s bright ideas nearly always lead to trouble.
And this latest idea was not simply going to lead us into trouble. It was going to take us straight to The Dark House, the most terrifying place I have ever seen. It was a return to all my old nightmares.
I mean, we all nearly DIED!
I’m going to be a vet when I grow up, like my dad. He’s fantastic. He stopped a lion coughing once. Can you imagine trying to cure a lion of anything? I’d have been scared stiff, but my dad, he just went straight up to it and said, ‘Open up, chum!’ And the lion opened its mouth and Dad tipped a spoonful of cough medicine down its throat and then came home. It’s true; Dad told me.
I think working with sick animals is a great job. Sometimes Dad brings the smaller animals home and Tammy and I help look after them. That’s how we got our mynah bird. Almost all her feathers had come off. She almost died, but Dad saved her. We call her Dinah and she goes everywhere with us. Dad’s always talking to her. Mynahs are terrific at learning words and Dad has taught her loads. He takes her into the surgery with him and sometimes I go too and help him. It’s all part of my plan to become a vet like him.
I reckon that if you want to do something in life, then you’ve got to get yourself organized. It’s no good waiting for it to happen. I’ve already started practising to be a vet. I’ve often watched Dad at work and I’ve picked up loads of information from him. And I like to actually try and be different animals, so that I can understand how they think and feel. I’ve read tons of books too – hundreds and thousands, I expect.
My friends at school are always bringing in animals for me to sort out. Last week Jade brought me a robin with a stuck beak, and Sanjeev is always bringing me problems. Yesterday he had two worms that had tied themselves together in knots. Actually, Sanjeev brings me so many animal problems I sometimes think that he’s deliberately testing me or something. Anyhow, I get lots of practice.
When I get older I’m going to be a proper vet and I shall give cough medicine to sick lions (if I’m brave enough) and mend elephants and stick broken ostriches back together and things like that. I shall probably travel the world, looking after animals.
My dad’s the best vet there is, but he works too hard. He’s always rushing around, seeing to sick animals, and when he’s not doing that he’s coming to school to pick me up, or taking Tammy to playgroup or the childminder. He never stops.
And he’s lonely. I just know he is. He’s only got me and Tammy now. I watch him sometimes, when he thinks he’s by himself. I keep an eye on him and, to tell you the truth, sometimes I think he’s going a bit mad with the loneliness. I often hear him talking to himself – at least that’s what I thought it was and then I realized he was talking to Dinah the Mynah. How weird is that?
He doesn’t just teach her words – he talks to her, like she’s a real person, almost like she’s his wife or something. He tells her what he’s been doing, and how me and Tammy are doing at school, and how he cut himself cooking, and the state of Tammy’s socks and all the sort of useless rubbishy stuff that he used to talk about with Mum, until she went off.
Dinah the Mynah sits there cackling and nodding as if she understands everything he says. Definitely weird.
So I reckon that what Dad really, really needs is a girlfriend. Then he can marry her and she can come and live here and he’ll have someone to talk to and he’ll be happy.
It was my teacher who gave me the idea. Miss Pettigrew is quite nice, even though she’s about a hundred years old. She’s retiring at the end of this year. She keeps telling us that we are her ‘very last class’, and she seems ever so cheerful. But she will make us do Country Dancing.
I hate Country Dancing. Miss Pettigrew goes to an Irish dancing club and she makes us do it as well. We have to stand there with our arms quite still and make our legs flip about all over the place. Sanjeev always manages to fall over and knock down everyone else. We end up looking like some sort of World Champion Pick-Up-Sticks Competition. I think he does it deliberately.
Anyhow, Miss Pettigrew was marking my maths and out of the blue she asked me how my father was getting on. ‘Is he still on his own?’
‘He’s got Tammy and me,’ I said.
‘I bet you and Tammy look after him very well too. But your father is such a good-looking man. Doesn’t he have a lady in his life?’
‘A girlfriend?’
Miss Pettigrew coughed. ‘I think “girlfriend” sounds a bit young. He needs an older woman. I thought that by now he might have a lady he likes.’
I shook my head and Miss Pettigrew didn’t say any more about it. But I was already thinking. Miss Pettigrew was right. Dad should have a lady friend. He needed a lady friend. But how on earth could he find one?
Sanjeev suggested the local newspaper. It comes out once a week and it has a Lonely Hearts column. He brought one to school to show me.
‘There are loads of messages from men and women looking for friends. Here’s one:
Lady, bubbly redhead, stunningly attractive, 35, wishes to meet handsome, rich man, GSOH, with houses in France and Jamaica.’
‘What does a lady with a bubbling red head look like?’ I asked. ‘She sounds like a Martian. Anyhow, I’ll never be able to persuade Dad to write to someone himself. I’d have to put an advert in for him. What sorts of things do the ads say?’
‘How about this?’ Sanjeev began.
‘Gentleman, 75, GSOH, enjoys fast wheelchairs, seeks lovely lady with own old people’s home.’
‘Why do they keep saying GSOH? What does that mean?’
‘I think it’s a short way of saying Good Set Of Hair,’ Sanjeev explained.
And that was how my neat idea was born. I talked to Tammy about it and she thought it was great. I had to swear her to secrecy. I said that if she told anyone, her teddy’s eyes would fall out, so she’s taken it very seriously.
The biggest problem was how to pay for the ad. I had a little pocket money, but I had to earn the rest of the money as best I could, and that meant washing Dad’s Land Rover.
I hate washing the Land Rover. It gets filthy outside AND in. Dad has to put animals inside, and sometimes they throw up or have a wee or worse, and they leave their hair all over the place and it just STINKS.
I did that for about a month, although it felt more like a year, until I had the money, and then Tammy and I sat down and we wrote an ad for Dad.
Peter, 34, tall, dark, handsome vet, GSOH, is looking for a nice lady to come and look after him. Small Paws Animal Clinic.
Tammy nodded and stuck her thumb in her mouth. ‘What does “handsome” mean?’ she asked.
‘Good looking.’
‘His ears stick out,’ said Tamsin.
‘No, they don’t!’
‘They do, like a donkey.’
‘You mean a monkey.’
Tammy shook her head seriously. ‘Like a donkey,’ she insisted, and her eyes grew really wide and she whispered loudly. ‘Daddy’s ears are HUGE.’
‘No, they’re not!’
‘And he’s got hairy toes,’ Tammy declared with a frown. ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone with hairy toes. I’m going to marry Robbie at playgroup and he hasn’t got hairy toes.’
‘You’re too young to marry,’ I snapped. ‘Look, can we get back to the advert?’
‘Will the lady be pretty?’
‘I don’t know. We haven’t seen her yet.’
‘Will she be my mummy?’
‘Would you like that?’
Tammy thought for a long time and then asked if the lady liked Sugar Pops. Sugar Pops is her favourite breakfast cereal.
‘She might.’
‘Well, if she does, I think I’ll like her but if she doesn’t, then she’s probably a witch because witches can’t eat Sugar Pops. It makes them explode. Robbie told me.’
I gave up. How could I talk about such important matters to a four-year-old who thinks her dad’s ears are like a donkey’s and tells you that witches can’t eat Sugar Pops in case they explode? You can see why I have to do all the organizing. I took the letter down to the post box and shoved it in.
Oh – is it my turn again? I was nodding off there. Mark does go on a bit. Hang on a sec while I get this feather straight. Got to keep up a good appearance, you know. Now, where was I? Oh yes. I was telling you about Mark’s Bright Ideas. This is a typical one, OK? It happened about a month ago. Mr Peter and I were over in the clinic. He likes my company. (Who wouldn’t?) My cage goes in the corner of the surgery.
Anyhow, we’d finished at the surgery and Mr Peter was carrying me back to the house. On the way there we heard this distant shouting.
‘Help! Dad! Get me down!’
We looked up and there, right near the top of a tree, was Mark, clinging on to a branch. He was stuck. Not only that, but for some odd reason he had a TV aerial strapped to his head. Mr Peter was gobsmacked.
He had to call out the fire brigade, and while we were waiting he began asking Mark why he had a TV aerial strapped to his head.
‘It’s for the rabbit,’ said Mark.
Well, there’s an answer for you! We should have known, shouldn’t we? It was for the rabbit. How stupid of us not to realize! I wanted to scream at him – What do you mean, it’s for the rabbit? What rabbit?
Luckily, Mr Peter more or less screamed it for me.
‘What rabbit?’
‘The one in the hutch on the lawn. He looked really bored, Dad, and I thought, the rabbit can watch TV. Then he’ll have something to do.’
‘But the rabbit hasn’t got a TV.’
‘He has. I put one in his hutch this afternoon, but I couldn’t get a good picture on it and I thought I’d put the aerial higher. I couldn’t climb and carry the aerial, so I put it on my head and now I’m stuck. Get me down, Dad, please.’
Mr Peter stood there, shaking his head. I sat there on my perch, shaking my head. That’s Mark for you – he’s always doing things like that.
And then there’s Tamsin. If you think Mark is odd, you should meet Tamsin. She does make me laugh! She’s only four but she’s got more energy than a nuclear power station.
Come to think of it, you remember I said it was because of Mark that we nearly died? Well, actually it was both of them. It was partly because Mark was trying to fix Mr Peter up with a girlfriend, and partly because Tamsin kept annoying her childminder. She came back one afternoon and Mr Peter asked her what she’d done that day.
‘I made a crockadipe from an egg box and Nasha helped me paint it,’ she said.
‘Lovely. Have you brought the crocodile home?’
‘No, cos I put it in a bowl of water and the paint came off and the water went green and the crockadipe went all soggy and fell to bits and Nasha was cross.’
‘Oh dear. Why was that?’
Tamsin shrugged her little shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she grumbled.
‘It wasn’t a bowl of water, Dad,’ explained Mark. ‘It was a fruit salad that Natasha was making for supper. The paint came off in the fruit juice and the egg box fell to bits. Natasha ended up with a bowl of fruit slices and soggy cardboard lumps all slopping about in green paint. She had to throw it away.’
‘No wonder she was cross.’
‘Nasha said I was more trouble than a box of monkeys!’ Tammy boasted. (That’s certainly true.)
Mr Peter seemed annoyed that Tammy had caused so much trouble, but he couldn’t help smiling. ‘I don’t think you should be so proud of being a monkey,’ he began, but Tammy butted in.
‘Not one monkey, Daddy, lots of monkeys – a whole boxful, a big box, a big, Big, BIG box as big as a brontosorepuss!’
I think Tamsin is so clever. Fancy making a crocodile from egg boxes! What a good idea. If only ALL crocodiles were made from egg boxes – there’d be no trouble with them at all, would there? They’d be just about to lunge at you with their snappy jaws all full of teeth and death and then, just before they got you, they’d go all soggy and fall to bits in the water.
‘Oh dear,’ they’d say. ‘I’m a floppy-crocky. Boo hoo.’
The next day was even worse. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it had something to do with one of those elastic ropes with a hook at each end. Apparently Tamsin had fastened two of her friends together, back to back, through the window of the playhouse. Clever girl! She’s brilliant! So now there was a toddler on either side and neither of them could get away. They were pushing and pulling and yelling and screaming and eventually the whole lot came tumbling down.
Natasha said she couldn’t take Tam any longer. She was too much trouble. Boo! Hiss! Measly old Natasha – what a fuss about nothing! She was only having fun. But it meant that Mr Peter no longer had a childminder. He would have to look after Tamsin himself.
All this happened just as the Lonely Hearts advert came out in the paper. Oh yes, Mark had told me all about it. I said I didn’t think it was a good idea, but of course he didn’t understand me. Humans are so dense. I’ve no idea why we can understand them, but they have no idea what we’re saying. Personally, I think it’s the schools and the teachers. It’s all very well teaching them maths and stuff, but why can’t they learn Mynah Bird? It’s not difficult. I’ve been speaking it since I was a baby. Ha ha. Mynah joke again.
Anyhow, all of a sudden there’s a phone call from Julie. She’s Mr Peter’s assistant at the clinic and she had just opened up for the morning.
‘You’d better come round at once, Peter. I don’t know what’s going on. The waiting room is jam-packed, and they’re all women,’ she explained. ‘They don’t seem to have any pets with them or anything. It’s just – women!’
Of course, I knew exactly what was going on and so did Mark, but poor Mr Peter – he had no idea at all. He started muttering, ‘Work,