Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? (16 page)

The Sound of Music
• Oh, are we never to be free?
The Sound of Music
was a film about some bint, Julie Andrews, skipping around the Alps and singing about goats. Many, many famous and annoying songs come from this film, including, “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of PANTS,” “You Are Sixteen Going on PANTS” and, of course, the one about the national flower of Austria, “IdlePANTS.”

Titches
• A titch is a small person. “Titches” is the plural of “titch.”

tosser
• A special kind of prat. The other way of putting this is “wanker” or “monkey spanker.”

vino tinto
• Now this is your actual Pizza-a-gogo talk. It quite literally means “tinted wine.” In this case the wine is tinted red.

waz
• Another expression for piddly-diddly department. Possibly named after the sound the piddly diddly makes as it comes out of the trouser area. I don’t know, to be frank. Only boys say it. And who knows why boys say anything? The whole thing is a mystery.

wazzarium
• A place where you go to have a waz.

P.S. You will not be finding me in there.

welligogs
• Wellington boots. Because it more or less rains all the time in England, we have special rubber boots that we wear to keep us above the mud. This is true.

whelks
• A horrible shellfish thing that only the truly mad (like my grandad, for instance) eat. They are unbelievably slimy and mucuslike.

“Wild Thing”
• This is a 60s song sung by a band called the Troggs. It is about a wild thing. That is how simple life was in the 60s. If you had a Wild Thing now (which believe me, I do) people would not say it was groovy, they would put a restraining order on it.

The Brethren of Angus

Up in Och Aye land, there is a nature reserve where they are trying to look after the Scottish wildcats and breed them up a bit. Please let us save them; there are only four hundred left and they have been in Och Aye land for thousands of years.

The bestiest news is that they are probably Vikings. They came from the North of Europe to Scotland and I am just guessing, but I bet they wore little horned helmets as they paddled across to our land.

They have an overhead run in the trees, like a cage tunnel and they scamper around up there because they like to be above people. When it is feeding time, they come down from the trees and into a central caged-off bit to eat dead chicks and rabbit legs and so on.

Scottish wildcat kittens pretty much lay waste to anything they can get at, leaping on leaves and twigs and wrestling with them, etc. They also luuurve doing flying face-pouncing and grabbing on to each other with their front paws to do bunny kicks with their back legs.

Their
pièce de résistance
is staring at things. And one-paw clapping: two kittens standing on their back legs and biffing in the direction of each other with one paw.

Find out more about Scottish wildcats at

www.scottishwildcats.co.uk.

Jacket art © 2009 by Howard Huang

Jacket design by Sasha Illingworth