* * *
*1 Alive and actually real.
1 This is the first of many fascinating facts you will learn as you read this book.
2 Interestingly, several years later a small chest of drawers challenged Merlin by delivering a nasty blow on his shin as he went by. The wizard turned the offending furniture into a confused, chinless aristocrat called Sir Lympleg Sprackthornley of Muddly Vale, who went on to achieve absolutely nothing.
3 See The Dragons 1: Camelot to find out all about this and The Dragons 2: Excalibur to find out what happened to the impostor next.
4 ‘Betrothed’ is a bit like ‘being engaged to be married’, but four words shorter.
5 Neither she nor Arthur knew that the impostor was actually their half-brother, no more than Brassica himself did. They will find out eventually and it will probably mean tears before bedtime.
6 I actually had a great aunt who smelled of deep-fried socks.
7 His only friend was the castle cat because, as everyone knows, cats are nasty, sneaky creatures who pretend to like you.
8 Don’t try this at home.
9 Or this. In fact, probably best not try either of them anywhere.
10 The rubbish included four kilts, seventeen sets of bagpipes and a large painting of twigs and sticks of the saints.
11 A Lord’s Ring is a special gold ring with a ruby on it that every lord in the land owns to show that he is a true lord. On his death it becomes the property of his eldest son. If the lord has no son, then the Lord’s Ring is made into the Lady’s Earrings and given to his eldest daughter. This means that after she dies and her eldest son becomes the next lord, he has to wear a pair of girls’ earrings for the rest of his life. It’s little things like this that make the aristocracy the laughing stock of normal people.
12 It is a well-known scientific fact that when you are sick there are always bits of carrot in it, even if you have never eaten any. The famous Scottish scientist Professor Connolly discovered this.
13 You might think he had nothing left to vomit up by now, but every time he opened his mouth and wailed, he also swallowed a gallon of seawater, huge amounts of very old seaweed, fish skins and a dozen dead limpets, in addition to his second-hand, third-hand vomit. There were, in fact, bits of rotten seagull he had thrown up seventeen times by the time they reached the mainland.
14 If you think this is far-fetched and rather disgusting, I can assure you that it’s actually a lot worse than this. I lived in the Outer Hebrides for seven years and travelled on a terrible car ferry through some serious storms. They chained the trucks down, but not the cars, which bounced between the trucks like ping-pong balls. I was seriously seasick.
15 This proved that every lining has a silver lining.
16 Captain Silver was extremely good at roaring. At school it had been the only thing he excelled in and, to keep his roaring skills at their best, he practised roaring at a pack of nervous greyhounds three nights a week.
17 Named after the legendary pirate and market gardener Diana A’Bolical of Broccolini.
18 Of which we shall hear more, or not, depending on how much naughty stuff my publisher will allow me to get away with.
19 The Diabolical Island’s top chef, Stewpot McCleaver, bit one of the newborn twins’ toe off, as he did with all babies before cooking them, and was so violently sick that he declared them inedible. This was not as terrible as it sounded because it meant that the twins were no longer identical, which saved a lot of confusion. In fact they were christened Ten-Toes Indigestible and Nine-Toes Indigestible.
20 He was so scared that he actually thought in capital letters.
21 I just put everyone’s full names there in case you’d forgotten them.
22 Last week my wife was lying half asleep in bed with a relaxing lavender eye-pillow over her face while I was reading a book. Suddenly she told me the lights had fused.
23 Urngristle’s mother was the inventor of the baby bib for this very reason.
24 Whatever they are.
25 See footnote 24.
26 Warm because the sheep were still inside them.
27 Fall over AND grow the moustache.
28 Of course, rugby hadn’t been invented back in those days and if it had, dragons would have been useless at it. But, as it says above, it was just a dream.
29 Which goes to show that even floaty, arty poets are basically deceitful and evil.
30 Actually, a radioactive cabbage glows in a very similar fashion.
31 When Mordred and his parents had been sent to the Rock of Death it had been called Seaweed Rock. Sergycal renamed it to mark the place where Mordred had committed the double murder.
32 And it was foot, not feet, because where his right foot should have been there was a very large rock tied to the end of his leg with animal sinews.
33 I lived on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides for seven years and the island was made of the oldest rock in the entire world. It is called Lewisian Gneiss and is only found on that island and one place in Canada. It is unbelievably hard. If you hit it with a massive hammer, the hammer bounces off and sends very painful shockwaves up your arms. This is true – my house was built of Lewisian Gneiss.
34 Oh, go and have a look on Wikipedia.
35 Dragons adore cake.
36 Especially chocolate cake with burnt bits.
37 Slugs are rubbish at being spies. Birds keep eating them, people pour salt on them (it makes them melt) and they have terrible memories, so they can never remember any secret-spy stuff anyway.
38 Of course in the Days of Yore all peasants were terrible-looking as they are in many parts of the world to this very day.
39 Almost no one knows about the Knights Intolerant. They are the most secretive society in the world and one of the oldest, and they still exist to this day.
40 Fizzle is the correct word for a group of dragons who are past their best.
41 A snorting dragon usually means at least five trees burnt to the ground.
42 This is Days of Yore speak for Big Girl’s Blouse.
43 The Patagonian dragons were generally considered to be the cleverest sort of dragons, especially by dragons who came from Patagonia.
44 Well, I did say he was the stupidest of the Very Clever Patagonian dragons.
45 I have been told by an expert that the Queen of England has one whole wing of Windsor Castle packed to the ceiling with more than five hundred years’ worth of dirty laundry waiting to be done. This is because one of her ancestors was told by an Oracle that one day there would be an invention that would make all the clothes clean again.
‘It will be called a bathtub,’ said the Oracle, ‘and you will put on your dirty clothes and climb into it and wriggle around until all the dirt is washed away.’
I believe that there are now fifteen servants at Windsor Castle sitting in bathtubs and working their way through the forty-seven thousand bits of dirty washing.
I have also been told that in one of the rooms of dirty washing they found four princesses who had been trapped there for almost one hundred years.
Isn’t history fascinating?
46 ‘But they could see each other,’ you are probably saying, and this is true. But they were so stupid, on account of being peasants, that it never occurred to them that they themselves might look that terrible. They all thought they looked like the lovely King Arthur or the divine Morgan le Fey and it was only the other peasants who were ugly.
47 As anyone who visits Italy knows, young Italian men spend hours each day looking at their own reflections. In fact, it’s very likely that mirrors were invented in Italy.
48 Not alive flies, who are very good at not falling like flies, but dead flies who have been sprayed or swatted.
49 Gorella did not die horribly when she reached the ground. Still fast asleep, she sunk into the pile of dead dragons and had a wonderful dream. She dreamt that she was lying asleep on a pile of incredibly handsome young dragons, who were polishing her s
cales with organic olive oil, frankincense and myrrh. In actual fact, she was lying asleep on a pile of incredibly handsome young dragons, but they were also incredibly dead handsome young dragons. As for what the olive oil, frankincense and myrrh really were, we won’t go there.
50 Yes, I know it’s not a proper word, but I think it’s better than ‘made extinct’.
51 The zero-point-one-one-one per cent that survived did so by crawling under a stone, where they eventually evolved into accountants. Hey, no one said nature was perfect. We can only hope they will eventually evolve into something better.
52 I realise that many readers probably expected Bloat to become King of the Dragons and go on to achieve greatness, but hey, he was only a big lizard, so get over it.
53 Mordred’s imagination was very vivid and extremely strange. The really frightening thing was that very often he had managed to turn his revolting fantasies into reality.
54 I would really love to be able to give you two or three pages of wonderful disgusting Days of Yore swearwords, but I’m not allowed to.
‘Too right you’re not’ – the publisher.
**1 But the smell lingers on.
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