My Brother's Famous Bottom Goes Camping (7 page)

‘Are you trying to change the subject?’ Mum asked with a smile.

‘Of course I am,’ grinned Dad. ‘Come on, everyone in the van and, no, Cheese, Poop is not going to sit with us. She might start flapping about and get in the way. She’ll have to go back in the oven. Come on, hop in and let’s go. And
I forbid anyone to mention any more accidents that I’ve had.’

Mum turned and smiled at us.

The safari park isn’t far from the campsite and we soon joined a queue of cars as they slowly entered the park. We kept passing signs that said things like:

No! I made that last one up!

It was pretty good and Cheese and Tomato thought it was amazing. Tomato held Cecily Sprout up to the window and shouted out the names of the animals she saw. ‘Look, Cecily! There’s a pig!’

‘It’s a rhinoceros, darling,’ Mum said.

‘A crockerator! You can see all its teeth!’

‘Crocodile,’ said Mum. ‘Or maybe an alligator. They look much the same and I can’t read the sign from here.’

‘I think crockerator is a rather good name,’ chuckled Dad. ‘It reminds me of Crunchbag. Do you remember?’

‘How could we forget?’ laughed Mum. ‘That alligator you brought home almost destroyed the house, not to mention Mr Tugg’s car.’

Cheese joined in with the animal spotting, shouting right in my ear and almost deafening me. ‘There’s a pencil! And another one – lots of pencils!’

‘Penguins,’ I snorted. ‘Not pencils.’

‘I wonder if they have a lake here,’ Dad mused. ‘The leaflet says they’ve got seals.’

‘Yes, they do,’ said Mum. ‘There’s the sign for it pointing down that track. They have boat rides too. Does this mean you want to feed the seals with your ice cream again?’

‘Ice cream!’ yelled Cheese, deafening me again.

‘Five scoops!’ ‘Five?’ repeated Mum. ‘Your eyes are bigger than your stomach, young man.’

I told her what Lewis had said and Mum’s eyes widened. ‘Yes, well obviously some parents are a bit silly.’

I kept quiet. I’d been
planning to ask for five scoops myself. We got to the lake and, sure enough, there was an icecream stall next to the ticket office for the boat. We all got an ice cream because Dad insisted.

‘Don’t you dare drop it again,’ said Mum.

‘I won’t. I’m going to tape the scoops on to the cone to make sure they don’t fall off.’

‘Dad! You can’t tape ice cream!’ I laughed.

‘Really? Oh, all right, I’ll nail them on then. Now, where’s the nearest seal?’

He was joking of course and we climbed on to the little boat and had a fun ride round the lake. The seals swam up to the boat and honked and splashed Tomato, which made her laugh but then her ice cream fell into the water. A seal ate it and Cheese thought it was so funny he threw his ice cream into the water on purpose and a seal ate that too. The twins screamed with delight.

Mum and Dad were not impressed. ‘We didn’t buy ice creams so that you two could feed the seals,’ complained Mum. ‘It’s your fault, Ron, telling them silly stories about when you were a child.’

Dad began to protest and splutter but he couldn’t think of where to start. Eventually he turned to me and raised his arms in disbelief. ‘All my fault again,’ he murmured, ‘and I haven’t even done anything!’

After that it was decided that we ought to head home. Cheese fell asleep in the van and Tomato played hide and seek with her carrot, which meant she hid the carrot and then found her… umpteen times.

And guess what was waiting for us when we got back to the
campsite? Granny and Lancelot! And guess who they had with them? Rubbish, our goat!