Daisy and the Trouble with Life (7 page)

Last Halloween I went to a fancy-dress party and dressed up as a ghost! Ghosts aren't real either. They're just small children with sheets on.

I didn't like being a ghost at first because I couldn't see where I was going. When my mum turned my sheet round, it was much better because then I could see out of the holes. And I could breathe.

Harry Bayliss who's in my class at school went to the party dressed as a hooley-hooley man with real fake blood and vampire fangs, but Vicky Carrow hit him on the head with her hooley-hooley stick. It wasn't a real hooley-hooley stick – it was a cucumber. Hooley-hooley men aren't real either by the way.

Except they do do real tears.

Harry Bayliss's dad came to collect him and all the monsters and ghosts were told to stop running around like loony ticks.

Vicky Carrow asked me if she could hide her cucumber up my sheet but I told her I needed both hands to eat my sandwiches.

That's the
trouble with party sandwiches
: if you don't take three or four all at once, other children will take all the nice ones.

Billy Laine said he had real bat's blood in his sandwiches. But it wasn't. It was raspberry jam.

So Vicky hit him on the head too.

And then she poked Jenny Pearson in the back for having a witch's nose.

Vicky Carrow's hooley-hooley stick got taken away in the end.

Actually, so did Vicky Carrow.

The
trouble with ghost sheets
is they make you ever so hot.

I was really sweating by the time my mum came to collect me. When I took it off outside by the car, my face went all cold in the fresh air.

Mum jumped when I took my sheet off, and pretended I was more scary without my sheet on. I only smiled a bit. I didn't laugh, because she's done that joke before.

When I got home after the party, I couldn't get to sleep, but when I did, I had a dream about skeletons. Which definitely are real because I saw one in an actual book at school once. Everything in school books has to be real. It's the law.

Anyway, in my dream four skeletons were chasing me!!!! And they were bouncing on big cucumbers like pogo sticks and trying to catch me!

It was really scary but there was nothing I could do, because the
trouble with bad dreams
is you always have to fall over before you can wake up.

But the more I tried to fall over, the more I stayed up. And the closer the skeletons got!

In the end I just closed my eyes and jumped . . .

My mum jumped too when I landed in her bed. She said she was right in the middle of a really nice dream about a handsome prince, who was just about to give her his phone number, when I had woken her up and made him drop his pen.

Which did make me laugh and smile a bit, and forget about the skeletons, because I hadn't heard that joke before. Hold on, I think I need to go to the loo again . . .

Actually no, I don't. I just thought I did. I'm OK.

In fact I think I'm beginning to feel a bit better!

Last night after I was sent to bed I didn't have any dreams at all. My tummy was too busy gurgling.

The
trouble with gurgles
is they sound really loud when they're your own gurgles. Especially if they're germ gurgles.

Germ gurgles are much more gurglier than normal gurgles.

By the time I'd thrown all my toys at the wall last night, and finished looking at my comic, and pulled all the whiskers off my rabbit (don't worry, he's a toy), my tummy sounded like it was a growling wolf.

When it was evening, Mum came up and pulled my curtains and told me never to pick anything up off the floor again apart from all my toys in the morning. Then she sat on my bed and listened.

She said my tummy sounded like a witch's pot and that trouble was brewing. And she said I only had myself to blame. She said if I hadn't been so naughty and put that dirty sweet in my mouth and eaten it, none of this would have happened.

That's the
trouble with mums
.

In the end, they're always right. And I'm wrong – I do need to go again . . .

The
trouble with loo rolls
is they always run out when you don't want them to.