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.

Fascinating Invention no.14 - The Indoor Flushing Toilet

At school we call them the 'toilets' (see left). Grandpa jack has a 'lavvie'; at home we have a 'loo' and the metal space capsule with the automatic swishing door, in the middle of our market square is a 'W.C.' There are lots of different names for it but they are all the same thing - the indoor flushing toilet.
The boys' toilets at school are always flooding. This is because certain people do not stick to putting the normal stuff into them but like to experiment with stuff like, smuggled out school dinner or Oliver-James' P.E. socks (they are massive) or four million paper towels. Of course, the flush cannot cope and the water floods out causing the caretaker to break out the lifeboats and Mrs Trundle to break out her high-powered assassin's rifle. I think the caretaker should be happy he does not have to deal with clearing out 248 chamber pots or the stinking tanks from outhouses but for some reason he does not seem to appreciate the history lesson.In about 1596 Sir John Harington may have invented the first flushing toilet for Queen Elizabeth 1. He was her godson and while everybody else thought it was a stupid smelly idea, the Queen was supposed to have had a go on one. Nobody can be certain because he did not leave a toilet to put in a museum and they did not catch on; maybe the queen just got annoyed because when it went wrong there were no plumbers around to unblock blockages because Sir John had failed to invent plumbers at the same time. Whatever happened it was not until 1775 that Alexander Cummings got an English patent for putting a water trap under a bowl (see diagram). GENIUS! But this 'wash out' toilet stayed outside the house until the Victorian times when everything changed. The new 'wash down' toilet came with a jet flush. Woo -hoo. There were lots of companies making toilets then and they were all decorated like flowerpots to make you think that going to the toilet was actually quite a fragrant and royal thing to do. In fact this was the time when ordinary people who had been having a poo for centuries, realised that the Queen actually went to the toilet as well. Queen Victoria asked Thomas Crapper's company to install actual toilets in her palace which as well as shocking a great many ordinary people also made Crapper a household name. The toilet has never looked back. My cousin, Jaspar still likes to pee in the back garden which does not please Mum but is one of the things about him that actually does not bother me.

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.

It Is All My Cousins' Fault

So Ok, I will tell you but first I have to let you know that it is all my cousins' fault. See the trouble was, they came round, which was quite weird as well as being a complete disaster because I am told to entertain Skye and Jaspar while the adults go and discuss Something Important. This is a terrible thing because:

a. The adults go and drink coffee and eat very expensive biscuits
b. Skye and Jaspar are fiends in human form
c. I need to look after my stick insects
I am not at all keen to combine b and c. but I would much rather put a and b together and see how they like it.

I cannot do that, so I decide to do the next best thing and that is to take the fiends in human form to be entertained in The Parents bedroom. I show them the wardrobe and the ensweet bathroom but they are not particularly entertained. I then very politely offer them the use of The Parents' bed for bouncing purposes and Jaspar starts to snigger.

'Bet they made it here!' he says and he starts making stupid 'ooh' and 'aah' noises.
'It takes a fraction of a second to do it,' says Skye.
She has adopted the lotus position and her brother begins bouncing and she is flying up whenever her brother comes down.
'What?' I ask.
'He-bounce-doesn't-bounce-know,' says Jaspar.
'bounce-we've-bounce-known-bounce-for two-bounce-whole months,' says Skye.
'Shut up,' I say, a bit disturbed. 'You do not know anything!'
'Au contraire,' says Skye, and she flies off the bed, completing a complicated double turnover in the air. Sadly, she lands on her tiny pink princess feet. 'WE KNOW EVERYTHING.'
'Up to and including how babies are made,' says Jaspar, beating the feathers out of the pillow.
I am relieved. I have known how babies are made since before I was born. The Parents made sure of that.
'I know that,' I say and allow a smug smile to pass my lips.
'Then you'll know how your Mum and Dad made a baby,' says Skye. 'A new one. Newer than you.'
I think I might have screamed and wiped the smug smile off my own face but I cannot remember much apart from feathers flying.

Nobody Asked Me

So this BIG thing is just about as big an explosion as you can imagine happening to me. And it really is not fair because nobody asked me.

Something BIG has Occurred

Something BIG has occurred. Eek.

Fascinating Invention No.13 - Bakelite, The Fantastic Plastic!

The Science Museum (where else?) has a fantastic plastic exhibition . Bakelite is the first plastic and was invented by Leo Baekeland in 1907, so, 100 years ago.

There was a time before plastic and it was a time made of wood and stone and glass. Of couse, The Parents still disapprove of plastic but you cannot have a phone made out of stone (too heavy) or electricity cables covered in wood (too burny) or glass Spiderman lunch boxes (too smashy).
Leo Baekeland made masses of money with some other fantastic invention and moved to a place called, Snug Rock where he spent years thinking about insulators. You may think this sounds very boring and it probably was but somebody needed to think about it because the beetles were getting tired.
For centuries, Laccifer lacca beetles beetled away making a varnish called Shellac - course, they were just the insect slaves of some people who ordered them about and made the money and probably did not give the beetles anything. But by 1904 it got worse; the beetles had to work overtime because everyone needed a coating for the all new and exciting electrity cables. The beetles just could not keep up and would probably have started a union or organised a strike or gone off work with stress if the first manufactured plastic had not been invented.

To do this, Baekeland used a machine called a 'bakeliser'. This was like a giant pressure cooker which could muck about with chemical gunk and make it into a mouldable substance. So plastic was invented and no more Shellac was needed.
The beetles could retire.

Fascinating Invention No.12 - The Super-powered exo-skeleton

If you cannot get hold of a jet pack, then get an exoskeleton because they are pretty good as well. Let me explain. If you take a close squint at the picture of the forklift-truck/fire-extinguisher outfit, you will realise that this is not an actual robot but a person with machinery attached to him or in this case a her because this is a picture of Sigourney Weaver from the film 'Aliens', when Dad says she is, 'not looking her best'. OBVIOUSLY I have not seen this fantastic looking film and have stored it up as one of the forbidden films to be watched round Dexter's house; but I can only think that if I was a girl (shudder) and I was fighting an alien monster (cool) I would not be very worried about if I had the right lipstick on. The point is that the exoskeleton she is wearing means she is able to lift a small car like a bag of sugar and that must be quite handy when it comes to destroying something bigger than you.

The Americans have been working on real exoskeletons (ES). They also want to use them to destroy things, probably aliens if they can find them. The first proper one was developed in 1965 by General Electric and was called 'Goliath'. This one was not very good because they could only get one arm to move at all. So if you wanted to be able to wave, for example a flag, for days on end, then Goliath would have been up for it. If both legs started moving at once, though it lead to "violent and uncontrollable motion" - bit like Dad when he is trying to dance (shudder). They also made the 'Millenium Jet' which is like a one person air-car and you can wear jeans to have a go in this.

Good things about ES: Enough power to lift a small elephant.
Can run as fast as a cheetah on an off day.
Bad things about ES: Enough power to squish the person strapped inside the ES
Not enough power to go for longer than one minute in the air-car. This means NO trips to Tesco and definitely NO room for shopping bags anyway.

Looks cool though.

They Can Only Mean Trouble

Aunt Caroline-call-me-Caz is a strain. I wish she looked like a proper aunt, like Queen Victoria but she does not. She is the little sister of my mum and completely the opposite to her. Mum is medium sized and has brown hair she likes to keep out of her face; Call-me-Caz is HUGE and has yellow hair with pink ends and it flies around her face in wispy waves. Mum says she has a big personality- whatever that means - I think she is just really annoying. For example, everything changes in the house when she comes to visit:
a. the smell - her perfume is called 'Mountain Air' and whiffs like toilet cleaner mixed with pepper
b. the noise - she is always giving advice all over the place in a voice set permanently at unearthly screech
c. the horror -my cousins, Skye and Jaspar are most likely in the near area destroying something
But the really worrying thing is that she only comes for a reason. Really, the only good thing about her is her van (see above).

'It's my aunt and cousins,' I explain to Dexter. 'They can only mean trouble.'
Dexter pulls a face. 'What, more trouble than ruining the Christmas market or discovering aliens or pressing the button at the Science Museum. That was a lot of trouble.'
'Yes,' I nod. 'More trouble than even that.'
He throws his bike to the ground and it tips over a large flower pot full of pansies made specially for Mum and Dad by Mrs Next-Door.
'What sort of trouble then?' He bends down and sort of brushes the pansies into a neat pile.
'Dunno.'
Skye's white-blond hair pokes out of the front door. Her blue eyes widen. 'You've murdered all those Viola x wittrockiana!'
Dexter brushes his hands. 'Eh? Wasn't me...'
She starts to wail. 'Mummmmmeeeee, Wilfred has killed the beautiful fleurs!'
She runs back into the house and her screams of anguish start off Mrs Next-Doors yap-dog. His little yappy head bobs up and down over the fence between our two gardens. Any moment now and Mrs Next-Door will be out with her big nose, clapping eyes on the pansies and there will be even more trouble - I have to stop the yapping.
So, I run to the fence and grab the yap-dog mid leap and it is so surprised that it stops yapping and starts wriggling like a big hairy sausage under my armpit. I had not really thought what I would do with the yap-dog once I had caught it.
I turn to Dexter. 'You see!'
There is no sign of him or his bike. Yes well. But my cousin, Jaspar is standing there watching me and laughing.
'What have you got that for?' he asks, pointing at my doggy armpit decoration.
I can hardly hear him above the crying and thundering footsteps coming from inside the house. Even as I hesitate, I also catch a glimpse of Mrs-Next-Door's curtain twitching.
The yap-dog starts again.
'In 'ere, quick!' says Jaspar holding the upturned flowerpot.
I do not stop to think but bundle the yappy hairy animal beneath the pot and sit on it.
'Is this what you are teaching my nephew, John? Is it? is it really?' Call-me-Caz has a bangled arm held up to her mouth in horror at my criminal dog-sitting. My parents are struggling to see round her sail sized dress. Skye is weeping over the wilting pansies and Mrs Next-Door is pointing a withered finger in my direction. I need hardly add that Jaspar is still laughing.
This is going to be a long day.

Fascinating Invention No. 11 - The Jet Pack

I am fantastically excited by the jet-pack! The idea started in the 1920s with a comic strip hero called Buck Rogers but his jet pack was more of a jet belt so he could jump about a bit and wave in an exciting way. By the time you get to James Bond and 'Thunderball' jet packs were worn on the back and involved a suit and tie. They used jets of gas to make the hero swoosh about.


Real jet packs were also really thought about during the second world war. The Germans eveloped the Himmelsturmer (Skystormer) This was so German soldiers could cross minefields, barbed wire and raging rivers. It was probably a great deal more interesting than going round things or using a bridge.
The American army got very excited about the whole thing and in 1969 Bell Aerosystems developed the actual jump belt. A pilot called Robert Courter flew about 100 metres in a circle as high as 7 metres at 45 miles per hour which is excellent but also a bit useless. The jet pack was a good idea but too mad and too difficult to spend a load of money on.




Problems with the jet pack:
-flight time is very short
-it is quite dangerous to actually strap jet propellant near to your body
-if the jet propellant did something nasty like explode the hero pilot would not be high enough to use a parachute and would land on the ground very fast, resulting in strawberry jam
-very difficult to fly anywhere other than up, maybe firefighters could use them for high tech cat rescuing.

So, apart from rescuing cats, you can use the jet pack like they do at Rocket Man, where you can hire somebody to leap in the air to make people buy stuff. The other place to really use it is in space. In space less thrust is needed because there is no gravity. NASA has emergency rocket packs which mean that if an astronaut falls out of his module or some evil space villain throws him out or maybe he has to carefully manouvre himself about in space in order to foil a plot to blow up the earth, then he can use his rocket pack or Manned Maneuvering Unit.


This is all very well but of course, the only true rocket man is Buzz Aldrin

The Ground Will Make Your Pancreas Ache

The pancreas was discovered by Herophilus (335-280 BC), a Greek surgeon but he did not bother to call it anything. A few hundred years later, Ruphos, another Greek anatomist, gave the pancreas its name. 'Pancreas' comes from the Greek pan, "all", and kreas, "flesh" which sounds as disgusting as it looks, like something bad from Dr Who.


Because I think it is Dexter bashing at the front door, I open it. Aunt Caroline (102) is sort of floating on the doorstep and The Unspeakable Cousins are pulling up Mum's daffodils. I think I scream but I cannot be sure because I am suddenly enveloped in purple dress and perfume and bosom.
I can just about hear my cousin Jaspar (9) say, 'I'm hungry!' and then everything starts to go black.
When I come round, I am lying in the garden and my other cousin Skye (4) is looking down on me. She has her bad fairy outfit on and a sparkly tiara jammed into her fluffy white hair. She pokes me with a silver wand.
'Get up,' she orders, 'the ground will make your pancreas ache.'
I cannot think of anything to say to this, apart from, "what is a pancreas?" but I do not say this because she is just a baby-child and should not know what a pancreas is before me and anyway she has gone into the house. I think very carefully about running away but I think for too long. Dad appears in the doorway and hisses. 'What are you doing lying about? Your cousins are here!' As though I was just dozing on the pancreas-ache-making ground and must have missed them. He hauls me to my feet and looks about him as though more aunts and cousins are going to spring out of bushes at any second. He is nervous - he'll start blaming me for stuff any moment. I can see Dexter weaving down the road on his new new bike. I want to warn him about the danger but all my trainee spymaker training is lost in the pain of Dad's Vulcan death grip.
His beard bristles. 'Why didn't you warn me they were coming? I'm in the middle of some teeth sorting and I've still got to mount Baden-Powell's molar...she'll want me to look at their teeth again...'
'I did not know they were coming until they were here,' I explain but it is no good.
He is ranting now about children and teeth and I just hope that Dexter has the sense to run away. At the doorway to hell, I hear the thumps and screeches that tell me Jaspar has found our cat, Serbena; daffodils lie strewn along the hallway; Aunt Caroline's laugh is billowing through the house.
Dad's grip tightens. 'Why did you pick all those daffodils, Wilfred?'
'We'll stay until the moon rises high in the sky, darling!' I hear Aunt Caroline say in her sing-song mystical sort of voice.
Dad's face is purple.
'Hello - what's up?' Dexter appears with his Bad Boyz cycle helmet on. It makes him look like a fat alien.
'And why is he here as well?' Dad shrieks. He points his finger at me. 'I blame you for this, Wilfred.' He stomps off into the kitchen.
Dexter shrugs. 'Problem?' he asks.
'You could say that,' I reply.
I think I can feel my pancreas beginning to ache.

Here is my Holiday Report

Here is my holiday report:
We went to London, mostly to get away from my Aunt Caroline and The Unspeakable Cousins. My Aunt is madder than a wet cat and that is pretty mad. We are still traumatised from the last visit (more later). For now here is the best bit.

We went to the wondrous Science Museum and I am now stuffed full of important spying knowledge. I still have my plastic security card and it has a magnetic strip and everything. So, now it is true that I am officially a trainee Spymaker agent; even though it says I only have temporary security clearance and my supercomputer rating is untested (not true, I actually scored 82% on my data retrieval from the supercomputer which is a lot better than Dad who scored a rubbish 23% and Mum who was having a coffee in the cafe, so gets -0%). My official spy number is 007, no not really, that was a joke, it is 2237. I am therefore only 2230 plastic security cards away from having a licence to kill people.
Cool.
My trainee Spymaker agent card says "Carry this Agent ID with you at all times. Never let it out of your sight". This is all very well but I do not have a pocket in my pyjamas and even if I did, I'm not sure I would be able to use it because then my ID card would be out of my sight and who knows what might happen.



Anyway, this is how becoming a spy works:
a. recruitment - practice getting embarrassing information about people at home and school e.g. go through the drawers in Mrs Trundle's office to find exotic hodliday brochures which she will try and pass off as 'edcuational exchange visits'. Then pass this info on to anybody willing to pay for it, e.g Mrs Trundle. That is a good start OR you can check out the MI5 and MI6 websites (which is a bit more boring)
b.training -are you cunning and resourceful? Can you spot a liar? Can you rumage around in rubbish and find non-smelly important stuff. If so, you are either dead right for a spy or you are my cat, Serena (that's not right, she likes smelly).
c.technology - this makes a spy's life easier. Frankly it makes anyone's life easier. Who needs school when you can absorb information through a chip under your skin designed to let you suck up important but boring lessons like, 'The Romans at Homes' or 'The Water Cycle - let's learn!'. Or you could use a micro air vehicle, an insect spy (I knew that one) or leave intelligent water just lying around ready to absorb your enemy's fingerprints or get your face scanned in a facial recognition system so that no door (except ordinary ones with locks and keys) is closed to you. My favourite is the super-powered spy leg and I have to tell you about this in more detail later, so do not run away (ha ha).
d. mission - it's up to you really but here are mine. e.g. find out what Mrs Next-Door is up to with all that concrete; find a way of keeping Aunt Caroline from ever visiting again; solve forever the mysteries of alien crop circles (wait, I think I have done that).

Anyway, the holiday was too short and now it is back to the prison of school and it is vegetable medley tonight.

Fascinating Eggy Facts for Easter

The largest egg in the world is an ostrich egg and this can measure up to 20cm in length and 15cm round. It probably has the strongest shell in the world and if 4 of me and 2 of Dexter could stand on it (bit tricky) it would not even crack. Also, the ostrich egg would take the longest to boil at about 40 minutes to make it a dippy soldier egg (soft-boiled)and not one of those disappointing bouncy-yolk eggs (hard-boiled).

On the subject of eating eggs, the most bouncy-yolk eggs eaten in one go is 14 in 58 seconds and the most dippy soldier eggs eaten in one go is 32 in 78 seconds.

The most eggs laid by one bird is 361 in 364 days. The was a Black Orpington called Princess Te Kawan. Crazy name, crazy chicken.


Fascinating Eggy Tradition

Grandpa Jack is a great one for 'jarping' and he taught me. This is a bit like playing conkers but using eggs. So you get your dippy-soldier eggs on Easter morning and you say to your neighbour at the breakfast table,
'I say, Happy Easter and all that and how about a bit of jarping?'
And hopefully your neighbour is a bit none the wiser and says,
'Of course, you go first,' because he does not know how to do it. So you can have first bash at his egg which is important because the winner is the one who pulverises the other egg into tiny eggy pieces. My record is 5 eggs in 10 seconds. Eggtastic.

Jarping can get pretty messy.

Funny Eggy Jokes

Q. What kind of egg lives by the sea?
A. An egg shell.
(Dexter told me that one, it is not brilliant but it does involve an egg)

Q. What did the eggs do when the traffic lights turned green?
A. Egg-celerate.

Q. How do monsters like their eggs?
A. Terri-fried.

Q. How did the egg get up the mountain?
A. It scrambled up.

Q. Who wrote Great Eggspectations?
A. Charles Chickens.




And last but not least my Fascinating Eggy Invention

Simon Rhymes, thought up the idea for the Bulb Egg Maker while studying project design at Bournemouth University. He experimented with more than 600 eggs and now says he can now produce a perfect boiled egg in six minutes.

He uses high-powered halogen bulbs to cook the egg before slicing the top off and dipping his toast soldiers in.

Maybe you could just stick an egg under a light bulb for half an hour and it will cook but then it would not look like it was going to be transported across time and space in that fantastic glowing egg chamber.

I want one.

HAPPY EASTER!