Skip to main content

Boil the kettle and unpack the trunk

An elephant and a kangaroo got on very well and would like to go off for a picnic, but they didn't know anything about the picnics, and had not the faintest idea of what to do to get ready, so the elephant asked a child what normally he did on a picnics. The child said, they collect wood and make a fire to boil the kettle for tea.

The elephant and the Kangaroo went off to the picnic-place. The kangaroo collected the wood and carried twigs and sticks back in her pouch; the elephant pushed down trees with his forehead and staggered back to the picnic-place with them rolled up in his trunk. They lit a bonfire made of whole trees.

The elephant said,"Now, let's boil the kettle!" He produced a brightly shining copper kettle and very large black iron saucepan, filled the saucepan with water, and popped the kettle in the saucepan of water, and put the saucepan on the fire; for he thought that you boil a kettle in the same way you boil an egg, or boil a cabbage!

When the kettle was boiled as tender as tender could be, they cut it fairly in half and shared it between them, and ate it for tea.

When it was getting late, and almost dark, the elephant said, "I am afraid we shall have to spend the night here, Kindly pass the pepper; I want to unpack my trunk!"

So then the kangaroo passed the elephant the pepper, and the elephant took a good sniff. Then he gave a most tremendous sneeze, and everything he had packed in his trunk shot out of it - tooth-brush, spare socks, gym shoes, a comb, and a bag of bull's-eyes, his pyjamas, and his Sunday suit. So the elephant put on his pyjamas and lay down to sleep; but Kangaroo hadn't got a trunk, she kept the fire blazing brightly and sat up by the fire until next morning.

Both elephant and kangaroo agreed they had a most fantastic picnic ever!

Abridged from The Elephant's Picnic, by Richard Hughes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same