The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe (books for 6 year olds to read themselves txt) 📕

there’d been a possible sighting of a Cyberman in Costco. I asked him if he’d noticed anything unusual while he was shopping with his mum. He shook his head in all seriousness and said no, he had not. I shook his hand and as he headed out of the store, he turned and said, ‘Bye, Captain Jack, but I’ll keep watching.’

And he did. He watched all the way to his car, when he gave me a little wave as his mum fastened him into his booster seat. I gave him a quick salute. He was beaming as the car disappeared out of the parking lot.

Two summers ago, I opened a summer country fete in the south of England and agreed to set up a table and sign autographs, with donations for them going to a local charity. I didn’t have a great deal of time open in my schedule, and, naturally, it was pouring rain and there were only so many pairs of welly boots to go around.2 The line was very long, so I asked if everyone would be okay with allowing the children to come up and be first in line. No one argued at all and, in the end, I was able to sign an autograph for everyone who waited.

One of the last children to step up was a boy of about eight or nine. He handed me his Captain Jack action figure and asked if I’d sign it. He and I took a few minutes to decide where exactly was the best place to have the autograph3 because this was clearly a well-played-with figure. While I was signing the toy, he leaned in really close to my ear and said, ‘I don’t care if Jack likes a man or likes a woman, he’s still my favourite hero.’ I was so chuffed. I gave him a really big hug.

During the summer of 2008, I filmed a number of segment links for my show on CBBC, Animals at Work. The show is made up of clips of animals doing really cool and amazing things, like an elephant in Thailand that cleans toilets.4 The shoot for Animals at Work took place at a rural zoo that I’m convinced was run by Basil Fawlty. I arrived very early in the morning and after a quick wander round – noting the overgrown vegetation, the stinking cages, the swarms of flies everywhere, and the sign that read ‘WARNING: Lions Roaming the Premises’5 – I began to wonder exactly what I was doing there. I mean, I’m a proper celebrity. I get recognized in M&S.

The zoo’s outbuildings consisted of a large bungalow, where Basil and Sybil Fawlty lived; a faux Swiss chalet that housed the zoo’s office; and a floor of dormitories for children who were participating in the Fawltys’ ‘summer camp for kids whose parents don’t have a clue’. Behind all of these buildings there was acreage dotted with cages overgrown with brush (thankfully, the animals inside looked healthy), gravel walking trails, and a large pond with wild peacocks, ducks, geese and a few llamas lurking nearby.

The producer for the segment met me at the parking lot and introduced me to some of the zoo’s staff; many of them appeared to be young enough to be avid viewers of CBBC themselves. The guy who was the keeper and main animal wrangler had to have been all of twenty-two. After enquiring about his training, I learned it consisted of a certificate programme in animal training and having a ‘great passion’ for animals, which he clearly had. But so do I, and you don’t want me taking care of your tigers. Trust me, you don’t. He was a nice enough young man, but I have to admit he didn’t inspire great confidence in me, especially when I learned that the director was planning to put me inside a cage with either a lion or a tiger cub for one of the segment links.

While the producer continued to review the day’s shoot with me, a number of children – ranging in age from about seven up to early teens – straggled out of one of the buildings and headed to a Quonset hut for breakfast. I didn’t want to ask what was on the menu in case I was sent out into the far fields and asked to hunt and skin it.

Before I headed to make-up, which had been set up in one of the Quonset hut classrooms, I asked to use the bathroom – and that’s when I realized I’d need to keep my wits and my hand sanitizer about me during this shoot if I wanted to get back to civilization a) with all my body parts intact, and b) without some rare animal disease.

The toilet I was directed to use was in one of the main buildings, next to the zoo’s administrative office. This consisted of three desks set in a row, each one stacked ridiculously high with paper and files. Behind one of the desks sat Sybil Fawlty, with her beehive hair6 stacked just as high, answering calls and giving orders to campers and staff who were wandering in and out.

I stepped into the toilet – and froze. The room looked as if it had last seen Dettol a few days before the First World War and it smelled as if the entire Foreign Legion had taken a piss in it. The toilet paper was non-existent; and if all that wasn’t bad enough, someone had had the nerve to stick an incense stick in a glass jar on the cistern. As if lighting it would have done anything more than add to the odour that was so thick and putrid I could taste it. But, and bear with me here, none of those things was the worst part of this toilet. This was. Instead of where a bathtub or shower should have been, there was a huge, glass reptile cage with one of the biggest iguanas I’ve ever seen inside.7 Two