Daisy and the Trouble with Zoos (4 page)

But I wanted to see the PENGUINS!

When I told Gabby and Dylan that I was actually going to feed actual penguins with actual fish out of an actual bucket, they were really jealous!

Gabby said, “Woww!” and Dylan said, “Coool!”

Then my mum said we'd have to go back to the house because she'd forgotten our tickets.

That's the
trouble with mums when they go to zoos
: they need to get more organized.

On the way back to our house, we sang Nelly the Elephant, but instead of shouting trump trump trump, we did great big elephant-poo noises! Mum let us because it was my birthday, but asked if we could sing something nicer on the way back to the zoo. No one knew any nice songs so we did animal noises instead.

The
trouble with doing animal noises
is zoo animals are really hard.

Farm animals are easy, but zoo animals aren't. No one knew what noise a rhinoceros made, or a zebra or a camel or a crocodile or even a penguin!

Gabby knew how to do monkeys and Dylan knew how to do snakes, but the only one I could think of was a lion.

Then Gabby had a brilliant idea. Why not do the sounds of a lion eating a monkey and a snake!

So we did!

Then we did the sounds of a monkey eating a snake and a lion!

But the funniest one was the sound of a snake eating a lion and a monkey!

With squirty cream!

I did the squirty-cream sound, plus the lion, and then Dylan did the sound of the snake plus some CUSTARD TOO!!

It was sooooo funny I nearly wet myself!

Mum said it was sooooo noisy too, then asked us if we would mind making the sounds of a giraffe instead.

None of us knew what a giraffe sounded like, so Mum said, “Actually, giraffes don't make any sounds at all.”

Which is silly.

And impossible.

So we all made hairy gorilla noises instead.

Mum said we were getting over-excited, which wasn't true. But when we started doing dinosaur noises, she said if we didn't stop, then she would.

When we asked her what she meant, she said that if we didn't stop doing dinosaur noises right there and then, she would stop the car right there and then.

So we stopped.

And she kept going.

When we got to the zoo, there were loads of people there already.

We had to drive for miles to find a parking space, but I didn't care. There might have been lots of people there already but I was the only one who was going to be allowed to feed the actual penguins!

The
trouble with actual penguins
is you can't just feed them when you want to.

Mum said I had to wait till feeding time, which wasn't until two o'clock!

I said they were bound to be hungry right now, and if I didn't get to feed them right away, they would probably starve to death.

Mum said they wouldn't starve to death at all and there were plenty of other animals to look at in the meantime.

After we'd put our tickets through the barrier we went straight to the monkeys.

Dylan wanted to go straight to the snakes, but I didn't mind where we went, and anyway the monkey house was nearest.

The
trouble with monkey houses
is they really pong. Gabby says it's the smell of you-know-what, but Dylan said it was mouldy bananas as well.

The
trouble with mouldy bananas
is they go all brown and squidgy.
My mum put one in my lunch box once, but I refused to eat it. She said it wasn't mouldy, and if I'd taken the trouble to peel it, I would have found a perfectly good banana inside.

But Gabby said if you try to peel a mouldy banana, it will explode all over your face and your school clothes, so there was no way I was going to eat it. Not even if someone tried to force me.

Monkeys don't care about exploding bananas. That's because they don't wear school clothes or even go to school.

The
trouble with going to school if you're a monkey
is you're not allowed to jump around in class.

Or swing from ropes or throw orange peel on the floor.

Jack Beechwhistle threw a crisp packet on the floor in the playground once and he got told off by the dinner lady. And he had to pick it up.

There's no way I would have invited Jack Beechwhistle to the zoo with me today.

Not unless we could have fed him to the lions.

The
trouble with lions
is they lie down too much.