Hello. My name is John Hegley and The BritishvLibrary has asked me to look through some
of my notebooks and old files. I found a drawing here of a dromedary or a camel and you'll see
it's got the one hump there. This is a goat, which hasn't got any humps at all, but it's
got two horns there and its legs are a bit short, but don't worry about that, you know?
This is a very small animal called an amoeba. Now it looks as though it's a bit like a fried
egg. That dot on the I is actually about how big it is in actual fact, and it divides to
make new ones of itself. That's amoeba.
This here is a terrapin, and this is an armadillo, which has the Latin name of 'Dasypus novemcinctus'.
I'm going to make up a song about this. Well, I've made the song up already, but I'm going
to sing it for you now on my cavaquinho.
[singing] My mummy she bought me an armadillo.
I kissed him and I kept him under my pillow And I cleaned him with a Brillo pad.
Now some of you might be wondering what a Brillo pad is. A Brillo pad is what you use
to clean your Armadillo.
[singing] He was shiny and tiny and he came from Peru.
His name was Armadeus, but we used to call him Toby.
He had a suit of armour and he burrowed about. The hills and the daffodils, he turned 'em
inside out And his mummy used to shout at him when he
came home covered in graffiti. He was an insectivorous creature, the teacher
used to say And the dog next door, the carnivore, would
sometimes come and play. We had races and chases, down by the riverside
And sometimes we'd go swimming and sometimes we wouldn't.
And he had ants and beetles for dinner every day.
Them creepy crawlies, he could put 'em away And he did his indoor doings in his indoor
doings tray. But one day in the winter when the willow
tree was bare I looked under my pillow, there was no armadillo
there. So I ran downstairs and I said to my mummy,
Mummy, where's he gone? She was having a game of Rummy and she looked
up and she said, John Go and put some clothes on! You're nearly
twenty-four. I said, Mummy, it's an emergency, and I ran
out in the raw. I ran down to the riverside and in a rowing
boat I saw Toby in the distance with the dog next door.
So that's an Armadillo song and sometimes I just write poems about the pieces, and sometimes
I do things called an acrostic where you take the word and you put it down the side of the
page and you say a word for each letter. So owl; open, wide, lids, because they've got
big wide open lids. O W L, ooh, woo, language.
So you can make up some longer animal names. For instance, you could try making an acrostic
for Dasypus novemcinctus, the armadillo. That would be a bit of fun. Don't worry about making
it to do with the animal. It could, it could be Daily Arthur says, Yeeoooo. You can go
on from there.
Anyway, the last song is about a parrot. This is a song really, I suppose there is an element
of a vision in this of people being nice to each other. If somebody is a bit strange,
don't worry about it too much and let them develop and they could help you.
[singing] Peter the orange parrot had a very tiny beak.
Unlike the other parrots, he was never heard to speak.
But they were never nasty to him, Peter the non-talking parrot.
They just thought that he was a very, very fluffy carrot.
Then one sunny jungle day, Santa Claus got lost
And Peter with the tiny beak, suddenly was heard to speak
And he directed Santa Claus back to Lapland To be in the lap of all the other lovely laps.
While the other parrots had been talking, Peter had been reading maps!
Thank you very much for listening. Get writing your own!