A Few Non Lethal Weapons

Aunt Harpy is staying in a secret location somewhere nearby. She will not tell Mum where it is, just in case MI5 come and find her for interrogating purposes. This is mad and also slightly annoying as we do not know when she will turn up and cannot prepare ourselves for a visit by being out.

Anyway, Dexter came round to show me his tennis racquet. His Dad bought it off e-bay and it used to belong to five times Wimbledon champion, Bjorn Borg. So it is a bit worn out. We go into the back garden and I get out Mum's old bat from her shed but we cannot find a ball. This is a problem, so we look for other things to hit. We find cat poo, a mouldy apple and a dead baby bird. The cat poo shatters into cat poo rain and the mouldy apple does not even make it to the racquet. The dead bird bounces the best but soon falls apart. So we then have to fight each other with fallen branches until Dexter gashes his arm on the end of my stick and breaks it. We stop and ponder our rubbish weapons and think about ones that do not produce so much blood.

Here are a few:

1. Fast setting glue. This could be like the stuff Spiderman uses and shoots out of his hands.

2. Instant banana peel. This is where you make the road so slippery nothing can stay upright. There might be a few problems trying to get people off the super-slippery roads though. They would probably be all over the place trying to escape. You might have to use something like...

3. Instant stiffening powder to cut down on flailing. Then you could use a giant shovel pusher and shove them into custody. Once everyone had stopped laughing.

4. Knock out gas or dart. Trials of these were carried out at Porton Down. They used a drug called 'apomorphine'. Something must have gone a bit wrong because they stopped the trials saying there was, 'an unacceptably high risk of death'. This is not good if you are just trying to stop a bingo night getting out of hand or somesuch.

5. Capture nets. These could explode into the air in thin coils of wire covered in glue. Then they land on people and hold them down.

All of these are actual ideas from actual scientists being paid money. I think you could use modified stick insects to crowd control people. You load their legs with glue and shoot them at people. They scream and flail but the stick insects stick to their heads or wherever. And if this is not enough then the stick could inject a dose of knockout gloop from its mouth parts.



I do not expect anyone will ask me but if the PM telephones me again at least I will have something good to tell him.

The Shouting Handbag

It is a true fact that, The Parents are meandering their weary way into the 21st century. I have actual proof of this. I will explain. Because of my baby brother George, I am now used to being shouted at. I was shouted at over the fantastic numbers of stick insects being born in George's bedroom. I was shouted at because I blunted the bread knife when I used it for whittling and I was shouted at completely by accident when Dad tripped over me doing jumping training on the stairs. Times are tense in this house. So, you can see I am quite used to being shouted at when The Handbag happened.

I am in the kitchen making some interesting biscuits. I have an Apollo 11 biscuit cutter, some left over vegetables for healthiness, some stuff from the fridge and half a bag of flour. I whizz them all up in the new machine bought for squishing up George's food into something that looks like sick (he likes it). It is when I am giving some of the interesting mixture to Serena the cat for testing that I hear the shouting. It is tiny shouting, like a pixie trapped in a hole or what a stick insect might sound like if it got angry. I look around. Mum's hemp and bamboo handbag is wedged inside the bread bin. At least it is not in the fridge like last week. Anyway, I can hear a voice shouting from the inside of the handbag. I listen.
"Hello! Hello!" the voice is saying. For a mad moment I wonder if Mum has shrunk to an incredibly small size and got stuck inside her own handbag. Or more likely she has captured someone very, very little and maybe even now is demanding a ransom for them. Grim. I decide to help.
'Who are you?' I shout at the handbag. 'Tell me what you want.'
'Answer me!' squeaks the tiny person inside the handbag.
'I'm going to free you,' I say, 'just keep quiet!'
I take the handbag and keeping an eye out for snapping traps, I rootle around its mysterious innards. And there it is.
A MOBILE PHONE.
I pick it up. Mum has got a mobile phone. I never thought of that. I am open-mouthed as I listen to it weebling at me in a familiar sort of way. I put it to my ear.
'Is that you, Grandpa Jack?' I ask.
'Who else would it be!' yells Grandpa Jack. 'Tell your mother to keep her phone under control will you now? She keeps phoning me every two seconds and then giving me the silent treatment!'
'I think she just forgot to lock the phone, Grandpa,' I explain.
'Lock the phone! Lock the phone! Give me the strength of ten men! Does she not trust you, my lad? That is typical...'
And he is off on a rant about the evils of locking telephones and all related topics. I hold the phone away from my ear and boggle at its meaning.

Here is Mum's pre-George idea of a mobile phone

Here is Mum's actual mobile phone.

I Should Be An Astronaut Before Too Long

It turns out that the European Space Agency need more astronauts. I think I will have a go because frankly, George is starting to get on my nerves. You do not need any actual space experience (phew) but you do need:

• to be ready for anything (goes without saying)
• you must like surprises (absolutely anytime)
• be healthy (no chance of anything else with Mum)
• you must like science (I'm in, except for, 'the body' because that is quite boring)

The bad thing is you also have to be ancient so I think I will use my Dad's name and see how it goes.

There is one good thing about having George around. To make me feel better about having to put up an annoying baby in the house, The Parents have been round to my friend, Miranda. Her Dad is a show-off wild insect explorer and she has got masses of stick insects which are my favourite pet. Miranda gave The Parents some of the tiny baby ones (about 12 - it is tricky to count them). I say, any number of stick insects are alot less bother than one baby brother but I might just be wrong on this because it turns out they can be quite a lot of bother in actual fact.

Sometime back, my best friend Dexter was trying to help me sort out stick insect poo from stick insect eggs and this is very interesting but quite tricky. We did this delicate work in the spare room but then it went a bit wrong and Dexter had to vacuum up everything - poo and eggs. That was about 6 months ago. The next thing is this:

Mum and George are upstairs in his bedroom (the old spare room), de-smelling him (again). I am minding my own business whittling an arrow out of some old wood, when I hear George start yelling (again) and Mum scream. I drop the breadknife and Dad throws down his copy of 'Smile! You're a Dentist!'
He runs up the stairs, shouting, 'For goodness' sake - what now!?' Like he is the one always being disturbed.
Then Dad starts screaming.
Then they both stop screaming to bellow, 'WILFRED!'
It is then that the awful feeling comes upon me. A feeling that whatever is happening in the ex-spare bedroom might, not altogether not be my fault. Crazy but true. My brain whirrs at superhuman speed. I put the spare room, Dexter's sloppy vacuuming and a six month incubation period for stick insect eggs all together in a fantastic micro milli-second. Based on the available evidence, I come to a conclusion and it is not pretty. On the plus side, I have dealt with the surprise of The Parents finding hoardes of ravenous stick insects in the baby's bedroom in a scientific way and therefore I should be an astronaut before too long.
'WILFRED!! UP HERE NOW!'
Just as well. I go to face my doom.

Job Done Then

Two disasters have ocurred and they are nothing to do with me. I left Dexter in charge of the sticks while I was in New York.The Parents had given Dexter's parents a key so they could come in and make the house look busy while we were away. Turns out Dexter's parents left that job to Dexter as well.
So the first disaster was that the house seemed to have exploded.
'It's a well known burglary prevention method,' he explains. We are perching on the hall welcome mat which is the one tidy space in the house. Mum is waddling around, trying to put things back in cupboards and drawers.
'That was very kind of you, Dexter,' she says and if teeth can really be gritted, then hers were all ready for severe winter weather. 'But did you have to make everywhere quite so messy?'
'The thing is,' says Dexter, 'our house has been burgled twice and it's always really tidy not like your house.'
'Thankyou, Dexter and there was me tidying up before we left,' says Mum and she gives a hysterical little laugh.
'So, I thought I would make completely sure that any burglars would not even bother with your house because they would not want to sort through all the piles and stuff.'
Mum is rubbing her enormous stomach. 'Very thoughtful of you but you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble - I think I have to lie down now.'
'But were you burgled?' he asked.
Mum sighs and shakes her head.
'Job done then,' says Dexter.
I pull him up the stairs to my room. Inside, I point out the stick insect tank. 'I quite like the new non tidy arrangement,' I say to him lulling him into a false sense of me being happy to see him.
He shrugs his shoulders in a modest sort of way.
'But I do not like the fact that you were so busy untidyting the house that you forgot to feed the sticks.'
'Ah,' he says. 'Are they all right?'
We both peer in through the glass. The sticks are plastered to the side in a desperate sort of way. They have nibbled all the greenery I left for them.
'Look there,' I say pointing at the bottom of the tank.
'What?'
'It's covered.'
'What?'
'Covered in poo and EGGS!'
What?'
I sigh and lift the lid of the tank. 'The sticks were so stressed they all had babies and now YOU are going to sort out the babies from the poo.'
He pulls a face but does not run away. 'Poo eh? And babies? Hmmm.'
And I am not sure wether it is the poo or the eggs that interests him most. All I know is that there are four million of them and they all look nearly but not actually, the same.
Get that job done then.
P.S. The camera containing photos was almost instantly lost when we walked in through the door but hopefully not forever.

A Shy Stick

I have managed to photograph my sticks. On the whole they do not seem to mind having their pictures taken; in fact they do not seem to mind anything very much. The first picture shows the back end of a stick and actually he is being quite shy.

ALL of them poo at an amazing rate and if I did not change the paper every week they would probably begin to mind that.

They also grow quickly. I will have to change the fishtank they are in very soon because it is actually meant for one small goldfish and not five 6cm long sticks. If I do not give them climbing room they will become stressed and their legs start dropping off like nobodys business.

On the Way to the School Trip

This time we are going to a medical museum. This is quite handy because at least three people are sick on the school bus. Oliver-James is the first to go (of course) followed by The Weed (Joshua Harcourt) and then because she is sandwiched in front of the weed and behind OJ - Miranda!!! Ha-ha-ha (cold laughter, she is still unforgiven after the Looking After The Sticks episode). It is all terrible really because the bus STINKS of the new sick combined with the left over sick from all the other school trips and I cannot bring myself to finish off Dexter's pack-up like I want to.

He has :
3 x packets of crisps all salt and vineagar
2 x slabs of chocolate cake
2 x packets of lunchables
3 x packets of polos (to stop sickness)
2 x bottles of lemonade
1 x manky apple

I have:
1 x wholemeal roll with cheese and grated carrot spilling out of it
1 x homemade carrot cake
1 x carrot
water with added carrot (joke)

Anyway, the really good thing about this School Trip is NO TRUNDLE. After last year when she was snubbed by Helen Sharman at the Science Museum, she went into a massive sulk and said that she would be too busy doing other things to go anywhere where children were involved or the school bus was involved (see picture) and definitely not both together.
So this year it is Mr Bagnall. Mr Bagnall believes that all children have an inner core of wonderfulness and that sometimes you have to dig quite deep to find the inner core but it is always there. His first name is Earnest which is worse than Alan but quite a lot better than Wilfred. As it turns out, my actual name at the museum is James Wilson and I am a servant and I catch diptheria - so quite a good day. More later.

A Badly Drawn Broad Bean

There are now five stick insects and two of them are sickly yellow in colour and bigger than the other black ones who have legs like feeble spiders. They are all 5cm in length. None of them do much - not when I observe them anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion that the moment my back is turned they turn on the disco lights and leap about to unsuitable music. Also, they do not eat. I keep putting in ivy leaves and bramble leaves but they just stare at the food and do not lift even one leg towards them. If I only start to get the tin opener out of the drawer, Serena my cat, savages my body. But not the sticks. I must take a photo so I have actual evidence of them eating.
Mum and Dad brought home a photo the other day. They went to the hospital to have it taken. It was black and white and looked like a badly drawn broad bean. They have put it in a frame and have informed me that it is a baby. Ugh. Then they gave me a copy for my bedroom. My bedroom is welcome to it, I say. If they are trying to get me to like it they are going about it in a funny way.

Mad Aunt Caroline has been phoning me for little 'chats' which is v v disturbing.
'You know your dear parents are unhappy that you are unhappy, Wilfred,' she says and her voice drips with Concern.
I stay quiet. I do not want to talk to her but I know The Parents are hiding behind the kitchen door, waiting. I wonder if the sticks are even now having a party and nibbling snacks.
'You must try and be kinder to them, Wilfred. Stress is not good for the baby, you know.'
I grunt a bit. I have to make some sort of noise. Stress is not good for the sticks either, I think. Maybe that is why they are spurning my leaves.
'Talk to me, Wilfred - tell me what troubles you,' she coos.
I must go and look after the sticks. It turns out that their legs drop off in times of stress. 'Can you tell me how babies are made?' I ask her. It is like a dam bursting.
'Of course! Darling! Just listen and I'll tell you everything...' and she is off.
And so am I.

A Distraction from the Big Thing

To distract myself from the Big Thing I am working on the invention of the flushing toilet.
In the meantime here is a picture of The Parents who are now alien creatures to me and live on the distant Planet Parent. From now on I will only answer to the name of Buzz as in Buzz Aldrin - let us see how much they like that.
I now have three hatched stick insects. They are 2cm in length and surprisingly chirpy. Babies are nothing to them.