by Paul Gamble
12 Some of you will have been wondering why this chapter was called “The chair of Destiny.” You will have expected there to be some mystical chair that told Jack what his future would be. It was just an ordinary chair, as it turns out. But the woman who owned the café was called Destiny. She owned several things that weren’t chairs. There was a hairbrush of Destiny, a car of Destiny, a nice pair of high heels of Destiny, and so on. Very few of these items had any significant magical powers. (For those of you who love your grammar, this is why the word Destiny was capitalized [proper noun] whereas the word chair wasn’t [ordinary noun].)
13 The proper name for a person who studies bears is an ursinologist. Grey clearly doesn’t know this word. It is vital never to mistake this word for the word urologist, which is the word for a person who studies wee. A urologist ursinologist would be a person who studied the wee of bears. The world is so unbelievably diverse that there is almost certainly a urologist ursinologist in it somewhere. His scientist friends probably bully him mercilessly.
14 Remember this point; it becomes vitally important in chapter nine.It’s a pity that Jack can’t read the footnotes, as they would make his life considerably easier. One of the major problems in trying to live life is the lack of helpful footnotes.
15 Are you wondering if there is really such a thing as a curiosity gland? Of course there is. Otherwise there would be nothing making you curious about whether or not there is such a thing as a curiosity gland.
For those of you thinking that you weren’t actually curious about whether there is such a thing as a curiosity gland, that probably just means you have an overactive apathy organ.
16 You may be wondering why you would ever consider fitting a tortoise with a pogo stick. After all, if Aesop is to be believed, a tortoise can beat a hare in a race. Of course the answer to this is that a tortoise could never beat a hare in a race. The true story about the legendary race between the hare and the tortoise is that the tortoise cheated the hare in two separate races. However, Aesop, like all good children’s authors, believed that all children’s stories should provide a moral lesson to their readers and so he didn’t report the actual facts.
I’m not a very good children’s author.
Make sure you eat five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day.…
Or not. Whatever. It’s not like I’m going to tell on you.
17 He was actually in his fifties; the reason for his youthful appearance wouldn’t become clear until much later on. However, if you want a clue as to the reason why, one of his arms was slightly longer than the other.…
18 A financial services arm is essentially a bank. Years ago when people worked in financial services they said they were bankers. Then the world decided that bankers were all evil. So bankers decided to change their names to financial services. In due course people will decide that financial services are evil and the name will change again to something else—like economic operation providers. This happens in all parts of life. You may notice that these days politicians have a tendency to no longer refer to themselves as politicians. Rather they tend to use the words “public representative.” This changing of names to protect images happens throughout history. Rat catchers became pest control. Toilet cleaners became lavatory attendants.
19 No one really knows what management consultants do—surprisingly, least of all, management consultants.
20 Madame Tussauds is very proud of its waxworks and claims they are identical to many famous celebrities. If they are identical, this means that many famous people are made almost entirely of wax. Therefore if Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Cruise pops into your house for a visit, it is vitally important that you do not let them stand next to the radiator for any significant length of time.
21 David said that he always felt slightly sad when he saw Mr. Rackham’s legs. Overinflated ballons are the saddest of all states for long balloons. Because you know that they will live and die as a balloon. Underinflated balloons have enough give in them to be twisted and folded. This leads to a great deal of excitement in their lives as at any stage a balloon modeler may grab them and turn them into a dog. Or a giraffe (dog with a long neck). Or even a poodle (dog with a slightly different kind of tail).… Balloon modelers have a limited repertoire and they are fooling no one.
22 Mr. Rackham also used the chalkboard and his nails instead of a whistle while the boys played football and rugby. Bizarrely enough this had a rather positive effect. All the boys hated the screeching sound so much that they tried to avoid fouling another player at all costs. Perhaps if professional sporting organizations wish to ensure more fair games, they should consider replacing all referees’ whistles with chalkboards. Although this would require referees to be professionally manicured as part of their training regime.
23 Wrong, wrong, wrong …
24 Mr. Rackham called all of the boys in P.E. “ladies.” The boys assumed that he meant this as a joke. The problem was when the boys were having a joint lesson with the girls, he also called the girls “ladies.”
Jack once suggested that his calling them “ladies” wasn’t meant as a joke at all and that Mr. Rackham just had an incredibly shaky grasp of biology. Although many people agreed with Jack that this was a possibility, so far no one had discovered any empirical evidence to back it up.
25 Some of you may be asking, “What does death smell like?” Well, if you want the answer to that question, just go to Jack’s school. Because there’s a pair of socks there that smell exactly like it.
26 It is hard to imagine what this would have looked like. An insect has many legs, a snake none. Therefore the suggestion seems to be that the creature that was spotted had a reasonable amount of legs. Although it’s hard to imagine why a creature with a reasonable amount of legs would inspire such terror.
27 If you’re wondering what Katy Perry song it was, it was “Roar”—rather appropriate, really.
28 Hence elephants are wrong about the white keys being made of ivory …
29 Please refer all the way back to footnote 5.
30 To clarify, we are only talking about the noise that the actual cabbage itself will make if you drop it into a street without people in it. If you drop a cabbage into a street with people in it, the noise it will make is a dull thud followed by, “Hey, who’s dropping cabbages?”
31 Duvet covers aren’t inherently interesting. Although what is interesting is how they actually make the duvets that are inside them.
32 As well as not having ears, squids don’t have noses either. Yet another reason they don’t wear sunglasses. If you read much about squids, you will also come to realize they frequently live in deep underwater, dark, shady environments. This is because they don’t want to have to spend all their life squinting, because their sunglasses have fallen off again.
33 Actually, gravity is anything but simple physics. Try asking your physics teacher to explain why it works. She will tell you about objects attracting each other and that this is how gravity works. Then say to her that you didn’t ask how it works, you asked why it works. Watch as her face crumples and she finds herself completely stumped. This will generally give you a pleasant feeling of smugness. It is a feeling that you will be able to enjoy at your leisure that afternoon when you find yourself in detention.
On some occasions this approach has caused high school science teachers to have mental breakdowns. In the event that this happens it’s only fair if you occasionally go and visit them in whatever home they’ve been put into.
34 Or how when you’re doing well at an exam and have lots to say it seems to be mere seconds before the teacher tells you to put down your pen. But if the exam is going badly, and you have nothing to write, it seems to drag on forever. Make your own list of these. I shouldn’t have to do all your thinking for you.
35 It is interesting to see how as technology has improved, these tracking devices have become more effective and miniaturized. If you look at your parents’ fillings, they are large, clunky metal things
, whereas modern fillings are elegant and white. Personally I suspect the people who design the tracking devices these days are the same people who design Apple computers.
36 Sadly, Jack already had two fillings before he joined the Ministry. The Tooth Fairy would always be able to find him.
37 It should be admitted that they were rather vulnerable to bows and arrows, but as long as you had a team of loyal knights with a puncture repair kit and a set of pumps, this wasn’t an enormous problem. It’s much easier to reinflate part of your battlements than it is to actually rebuild them.
38 He was not thinking how unusual it was to be loved by anyone. Mr. Tom Jones has been very clear about that point. That is not unusual at all.
39 If you haven’t guessed already, Jack read a lot of comics and graphic novels.
40 The stone hand was enormous. Jack imagined that if he had heard fingernails this large being pulled down a huge chalkboard his head would have exploded.
41 Jack noticed that the face painted on the lid of the sarcophagus had large black lines painted around its eyes. He wondered if the ancient Egyptians had been big fans of pandas or were just Goths.
42 There is also evidence to show that 86 percent of people who were bitten by crocodiles in Ancient Egypt were bitten only because they could not run away, as their legs were overly covered in bandages.
43 Because even the editor of the Ministry Handbook is terrified of the Misery.
44 This would be less tragic if I weren’t currently sitting in front of a computer, surrounded by piles of books, and wearing a Star Wars dressing gown.
45 And even if I did get that tweet I wouldn’t be able to go. I don’t have anything to wear, and I’m pretty sure that a Sith dressing gown doesn’t count as “black tie.”
46 Jack was annoyed to have to admit that gravity was still working effectively. He was still rather irritated about how mean gravity could be after what it had done to him in chapter twenty-three.
47 Jack would find out himself why it was a bad idea to go to the quartermaster for equipment. But not until chapter thirty-eight. I wouldn’t hold your breath until you get there if I were you. Unless you are either a phenomenally fast reader, or alternatively able to hold your breath for a very, very long time because you are a whale or some other kind of aquatic mammal. If you are a whale and are reading this, how are you keeping the pages dry? I assume you can achieve it by laminating each page individually. However, that seems very labor-intensive.
48 If a teacher had been watching them, they would have had no idea that it was happening. Teachers spend years in college learning to watch people without their realizing it.
Some people believe that teachers learn about the subject they teach while at college. However, if teachers really knew about their subject, schools wouldn’t need textbooks. Textbooks are only necessary when someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. With a textbook a teacher just needs to ensure that they have read one chapter ahead of the kids they are teaching.
If you wish to test this, read an entire textbook on your first day of class and watch how nervous it makes your teacher when you tell them.
49 It is. It sounds like it shouldn’t be, but it is.
50 Actually, this may not be a good metaphor. A hug from a six-foot bunny rabbit would most likely be terrifying. Apart from anything else you’d be asking yourself questions like “What evil scientist has made a six-foot bunny rabbit? And while the scientist was making it larger did he change its dietary preferences from raw carrots to raw human flesh?” Please feel free to scribble out this metaphor and write in a more appropriate one of your own devising.
51 Like unsuspicious, interestingness sounds as if it shouldn’t be a real word either. But it is. Believe me. The way they sound, I imagine that the two words are probably good friends. They probably collect stamps and play MMORPGs together.
52 Jack quietly wished that Mr. Teach had employed one of the mad scientists who tried to invent bananas rather than one of the evil ones. (See chapter fourteen.)
53 People who study stones are called geologists. It’s strange that they can’t think of anything better to do with their time. Stones never move or do anything interesting. Being a geologist must be even more boring than being a urologist ursinologist.
54 Jack is the only person ever to wish this. The purchase of a plastic dinosaur is an important transaction and significant lifestyle choice. It is essential to take your time and think about what kind of plastic dinosaur would make you happiest. There’s a natural instinct that suggests you just go straight for the Tyrannosaurus rex. But the beauty and understated grace of a Dyoplosaurus has a lot to recommend it. In terms of color, it’s hard to go wrong with purple.
55 One made from especially tough kangaroo pouch fluff.
56 “It” being a thought, rather than a polar bear paw. For those of you who like to know all the little details, the name of the polar bear was Peter.
57 Jack secretly hoped to himself that they hadn’t got any of the bandages from the Ancient Egypt section of the museum.
58 If someone made a film called Revenge of the Werehamster, I, for one, would definitely go and see it.
59 Jack’s parents were very clear on this. A schoolbag was expected to last for at least a year, or until one of the other kids in his class had written a rude word on it. Whichever came first.
60 It should be pointed out that the planks no longer looked like scaffolding. Now that Trudy and Jack had finished with them, what they looked like was the floor of a very bad woodwork class.
61 In the old days untraceable poisons would be made from Amazonian frogs. These days you could probably buy untraceable poisons from Amazon. Just goes to show you, the world likes balance and everything in life is circular (especially circles).
62 And obviously it would also have squashed Jack quite badly. It would almost certainly have resulted in a fatal squashing. Fatal squashings do occur occasionally. However, a friend of mine who is a coroner has reassured me that they are thankfully rare.
63 For further evidence of this please see chapters eighteen and nineteen.
64 Alternatively, make up your mind to just look in one place. This will then be “the last place you would look.”
65 Slapping someone in the face is exactly the kind of thing that you shouldn’t do to someone who has suffered from severe head trauma, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that it was also exactly the kind of thing that they taught you to do as part of the Ministry First Aid course. The Ministry’s medical care really wasn’t good.
66 Unless you had really, really bad parents.
67 Except this one. Obviously. This is all true. Totally.
68 It should be pointed out that even though Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows (an absolute masterpiece of literature) he also worked in a bank. So not only did he lie to children, but he probably lied to just about everyone.
69 Just because they’re pirates it doesn’t mean that they aren’t well-organized.
70 It is interesting to note that David never actually learned what to do with a drunken sailor midafternoon or in the evening. The instructions he received only detailed what to do with him early in the morning.
71 The Marble Arch Caves are a geopark in Northern Ireland, including stalactites and stalagmites, underground rivers, caverns, and passageways. Well worth a visit.
72 It is worth noting that the fact that Trudy asked this question later saves her life. You should continually ask adults questions because you never know when one of their answers will save your life. Also, adults find it really irritating if you’re always asking questions. So you know … that’s a bonus.
73 Interestingly enough there really was another Cthulhu, Janet Cthulhu, who was an office cleaner and always brought cupcakes in for people’s birthdays. This sometimes caused amusing confusion. It also sometimes caused people to avoid birthday cupcakes when they heard that “Cthulhu” had brought them in. They were worried they mi
ght be from the other Cthulhu and would therefore be ancient and evil cupcakes of unimaginable power, which would cause the populace of the world to descend into madness and insanity.
74 When anyone begins a sentence with “Now, the interesting thing is,” you can immediately surmise that what they are about to tell you isn’t interesting in the slightest. If it was interesting, they wouldn’t have had to tell you it was interesting. It is, however, the kind of thing that parents are always starting their sentences with.
75 For those of you who want to know exactly what shade Jack blushed, on a Dulux color chart his cheeks would have been considered Fire Cracker 2.
76 Suffocation through spluttering is in fact the most common cause of dying through embarrassment. People often say “I nearly died of embarrassment,” without realizing that it is technically possible. The easiest way to avoid dying of embarrassment is simply to not take oneself too seriously. If you learn to laugh at yourself, it doesn’t seem so bad when other people do it as well.
77 Burglaring is not a real word.
78 Trudy is right about this. It isn’t.
