When I was a teenager I was lucky
enough to go to Florida with my family for our summer holiday. Needless to say,
we were having a jolly old time, holidaying here, vacationing there. All of
that fun can be hungry work, and as we were in the big US of A, we thought it
would be great to go to one of those American all-you-can-eat diners. We'd had
a lovely meal (please don't stop reading, I will get to the point, I promise!),
we were all stuffed, and it was clearly time for dessert (there's always room
for ice cream, after all...).
Before we
continue, I must mention one thing, and that thing is my younger brother.
He's...well, he can be a bit...mischievous from time to time. He'd
already been told off for being hugely inspired by the Pirates of the
Caribbean ride in Disney World and trying to make my younger sister walk
the plank off of a kayak she was in later on in the Florida Keys. Of course,
the kayak had no plank, it was mostly just my brother pushing my sister into a
jellyfish-infested lagoon. Why, at that very dinner, my brother had already
called me over to the dessert area and made me cry with laughter showing me how
the ice cream that squirted out of the machine looked astonishingly like poo.
It was true, it did! Our laughter was getting us a lot of disgruntled looks
from the others trying to enjoy their meals in the restaurant, and not wanting
to be those guys, we tried our best to simmer down the frivolity.
My brother went back to the poo machine for seconds, and was gone
for quite a while. We couldn't see him, as our table was in another section of
the restaurant. You could see the worry creep into parent's eyes. Where is
he? Why has he been gone for so long? What is he up to? Time passed, and my
brother came rushing back, looking quite dishevelled. 'Quick! Hand me the
serviettes!' he cried, 'pass me some tissues!'
'What have
you DONE?!' my dad asked angrily.
'It wasn't my
fault!' (A classic younger brother line). It turns out, on the way back from
the ice-poo-machine, my brother had trodden on one of those little milk-pod
thingies, y'know, the small things you get at motorway service stations, where
you peel back the lid and there's a small amount of milk inside? Yeah, those
things. He'd trodden on one that happened to be on the floor and the whole
thing had exploded over this poor American woman's nice coat. My brother was
desperately trying to wipe off the dripping milk, and my dad came over to
apologise to the lady, furious at my brother. 'I'm so sorry,' he said to the
angry woman. 'I'm so, so sorry about this. I don't know what my son was
thinking. He'll clean it up for you! And I – I…' my dad began to stutter,
looking down at the floor. 'I… I appear to have done the same thing...'
And he had! Dad had gone and trodden on another of those milk
pods, and the milk had once again exploded all over the lady's coat. The woman,
who had begun to look a bit less angry, looked full-on livid now. Was
this some kind of bad joke? 'I'm sorry,' was all my dad could say. 'We're
English.'
To this day, I still don't know why there were so many milk pods
on the floor of that restaurant.
Jamie
Littler
Jamie Littler graduated from
the Arts Institute at Bournemouth in 2008 and won a High Commendation in the
Macmillan Children’s Book Award. He is the creator, writer and illustrator of
the comic series Cogg and Sprokit which was serialized in the
Phoenix Comic. He’s illustrated many children’s books including Hamish and the WorldStoppers and Hamish and the NeverPeople, and is the
cover illustrator for Holiday Ha Ha Ha!
@jamieillustrate
Holiday Ha
Ha Ha!
From amazing aliens and strange superheroes to fantastic forests
and crazy creatures; from ghoulish ghost tours and tiresome traffic jams to
super spies and terrible talent shows – you’ll be laughing all summer with
these eight summer sillies!
Comments