He’s lost his feather, but I am sure you can tell that this is Prince Doily I. Just in case you were wondering, he’s originally from Rajasthan, but I found him on a stretch of the North Downs Way near Borstal in Kent. He’s only recently escaped from a locked drawer where he’s been kept prisoner for a century. Prince Doily I said we can call him Pridi for short, because it sounds a bit like ‘pretty’, which he most surely is. Pridi smiles when you say stuff like that to him, because he’s well into manners and enjoys a good fluff of his ego every now and then. Floral language is one of his specialities: he learnt the intricacies of it during a secondment to an illustrious Iranian court six hundred years ago. Pridi said he was glad to have met me and particularly commended me for my maxim: ‘manners
The Society of Bud Kissers was founded in 1482 and thus has a long and distinguished history of welcoming spring. Its members operate individually and as part of a group, depending upon temperament and location. Their principal job is to welcome spring by, as the name suggests, kissing the emergent buds of leaves and flowers. The greater the amount of kisses a plant receives, the more gloriously it will flourish that year. Maisie is the head of the River Great Ouse chapter, and has been bud kissing for most of her life. She was first welcomed as a bud kisser by her grandmother as part of her third birthday ceremonies. Always on the lookout for new members, her grandmother’s keen eye observed Maisie turn down a kiss from Thomas and instead lay a fat one on a daisy. It was therefore foreseen, from an early age, that Maisie would one day
Colin was a JJytgHQp (pronounced Thrussup) and has been living in and around Leith Hill since Neolithic times. He and a band of 40 brothers and sisters arrived in Britain in 4036 BCE with not much more than the multicoloured shells on their backs. They were quite a sight to behold, or so I’ve been told, emerging from the sea at various points around the Welsh and Cornish coasts. Like merpeople, but with less cultural baggage. At first, the inhabitants of Britain didn’t pay them no mind, as the island was sparsely populated and sharing was not a problem. There were a few ladies, of course, who wondered if the JJytgHQp’s shells could be repurposed into shelter, wind chimes, or clothing, but no one was rude enough to try to take the shells off the JJytgHQp’s back. Except, of course, Rapskalbana. Rapskalbana was the most daring lady of Britain, although she
I know it doesn’t look like it, but this is a dinosaur; I found it in Knole Park. It has deliberately camouflaged itself to look like a dead log, but if you stare at the wide, circular opening, you’ll come to see that it’s actually a giant mouth, beckoning you to enter. Dinosaurs are always hungry, even dead ones. This is a standard natural history fact, and it’s why there are armed security guards around the National History Museum at night. Just saying. Anyway, point is, this dinosaur, whom we shall call Deadloggosaurus, wants you to enter, but you’d be wise to hold off on that. For starters, at night, hoards of demonic creatures come scuttling out. Some of them carry a bag of rosehip powder which they spend the night pouring down human noses. Ever wake up with inexplicable allergies? Now you know why. Other things which come out of
Richard was an over-thinker, that’s why his boughs and branches were curled erratically and so close to his trunk: he couldn’t decide on the direction of growth. His stunted appendages, all cluttered and clustered around him, obscured his view. Thus, he only ever partially grasped the goings on of the woods, and in his half-knowledge there was a darkness: he always chose the most unhelpful and fearful point of view. It had been a long time since the people of the forest had tried to talk him down from whatever terrified drama he was riding on. They had exhausted their capacity for trying to make him see sense. Nowadays, they observed him from a distance, and resigned to accept him as chaotic and panic-ridden. There goes Richard, they’d say, talking up the devil from the deep. Richard was alone in his unhappy corner of the forest, and only the young and