Friday, April 28, 2006

Now we can be real jungle explorers


The jungle. It's a fiercesome place, filled with oversized disease carrying insects, lost neighbours and heaps of cat poo-our garden actually. Mum and Dad saw Mrs Next-Door sneaking through the broken fence once. She was carrying an air rifle. Dad thought she was hunting for cats to shoot and he went out to find her but he got lost. Mum went out to search for him and found Mrs Next-Door. She was hopping about, swatting at flies with the barrel of her gun. She had trodden in cat poo and was a bit unhappy. Mum said she'd lost it which was quite funny for Mum.

So Dexter and me are going to chop up some logs for The Parents. Dexter is amazed when I tell him.
'Will your Mum and Dad let you do that?' he asks, as we crunch along the drive to the garage.
'Oh yes,' I say, airily; although I know The Parents would NOT let me near an axe really. 'There're some axes in the garage. They need some logs for the fire. They told me.'
We squeeze past the car and come to the workbench. There are two small axes hanging from nails. Dexter accidentally scratches the car but it's not much. We run into the back garden-jungle, whooping and waving the axes. Now we can be real jungle explorers. Some of the weeds and bushes are over my head. I hack them down and startle two cats out into the open. We spend forever looking for branches low enough to hack off. There are none. I only find a few weedy twigs lying on the ground.
'Can you burn cat poo?' asks Dexter. 'I've found loads of it.'
'I tried setting fire to it once,' I say, 'it's a bit smelly. Let's go to the clubhouse and try out your ears in the dark.'
We race to Dad's tumbledown shed, leaning against the garden wall. And inside is just what we've been looking for.

No comments: