49 Because he was so clever he had skipped the first six heavens and gone straight to the seventh one. Actually, since he met Maldegard Ankle he has been in fourteenth heaven, though seven of them belong to Maldegard.
50 TV rights for this show are currently under negotiation to be sold to Belgium and Australia. England turned it down because they thought it was too intellectual. Maybe this explains why The Floods books are being published in lots and lots of countries none of which are England. They are just too clever for them.
51 This what happened to my cousin Crawford. One minute he was a snivelling whinging toddler and the next a wonderfully silent garden gnome fishing by a goldfish pond.
52 Actually you need two cardboard boxes, some sticky tape and a dead person.
53 Lucy Axton, aged 11, just emailed me to tell me that every single primary school child in Belgium has to learn the harmonica. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that this is actually an urban myth, but we are both going to pretend that it is true, because it’s brilliant and only goes to show that the truth is quite often not nearly as good as made-up stuff.
54 The full list of what the people of Transylvania Waters were missing is three hundred pages long and is printed in letters that are much smaller than these.
55 Actually, luck and timing had nothing to do with it. Nerlin simply performed a spell, but kept quiet about it.
56 See the back of this book for details.
57 See the picture book, The Floods Family Files.
58 So far there are seven families driving round and round this rubbish dump unable to find the exit.
59 Meaning they wound round a lot, not that the wind blew down them a lot.
60 Don’t try this at home. Lightning is NOT your friend. I once knew a lady who had been hit twice by lighting. Once, when she was inside her kitchen washing up, the lightning came through the window and hit the stainless steel sink she was leaning against. She got really bad burns across her tummy. What do we learn from this? Buy a dishwasher. This is a true story. The second time she was hit, she was sheltering from the rain under the only tree in the middle of a huge empty field. What do we learn from this? The famous statement, ‘Lightning never strikes in the same place twice’, is rubbish.
61 See The Floods 7: Top Gear.
62 Except for a very, very old chicken called Ethel, who had tripped over a leaf and broken the only egg she had managed to produce in the past month, and the three exiles on Rockall, who sat and watched the sunset as they sucked a pebble because they had no glasses to drink out of and nothing to put in a glass anyway except their own dribble. They only had one pebble too, so each night there was an argument over who got to suck it first.
Random House
Floods 8 Page 11