Back from Australia and back to reality…

Carden Primary have impressed Ashley with their circus acts and its spurred him on to set the next task!

Hi there people,

I’ve come back from Australia now and I’m almost awake at the same time as everybody else.

It was very confusing over there. Not only was it the height of summer, but it was also eight hours in the future, so when you were having your breakfast at 8 o’clock in the morning, I was having afternoon tea at 4pm.

All very odd.

Anyway, home now.

Thank you so much for sending me the brilliant bits of writing and drawing you did last week. Some of them made me laugh a lot.

I thought I’d say a few words about some of my favourites.

I laughed and laughed when I heard about ‘Burt  the Baggiest Boy’ – he takes all his clothes off really quick and does a handstand. It’s not an act I actually want to see, in fact I think I’d probably pay Burt money to not do his act, but I loved the strangeness of it and the chutzpah.

I found Flaming Fire’s act slightly terrifying. I’ve seen fire breathers before, but never one who sets fire to the crowd’s eyes!

Also Tommy the Terrible Terrifier was rather scary too – he sets himself on fire and dives in a pool of sharks and crocodiles. I really liked the audience comments in the drawing for this one.

I also laughed when I read about Lilia the not so Legendary and her jumping through flaming hoops, especially how she always sets fire to her bum because she goes too low through the last hoop!

Solly the Fat made me giggle, because his was one of the few acts that didn’t impress the audience – he eats ten tubs of ice cream in eleven seconds, but the audience boo because the tubs are very small! Brilliant!

You all did great with that bit of work – especially doing the pictures as well and there wasn’t one that didn’t make me smile.

Thank you so much.

Circus Names and Fancy Acts!

Dear new friends,

It’s hard to know exactly how to begin this, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t even know your names, so I can’t begin the e-mail with a  proper beginning that says ‘hello’ to you properly. You know, ‘Hello Susan and Dave and Ravi and Bridgid and so on…’ So I hope you’ll forgive me for just saying ‘new friends’ and understand that it includes all of you.

My name’s Ashley. That’s what the ‘A’ of the ‘A.F.’ stands for, and you should feel free to call me Ashley because I’m not a teacher or anything like that, so there’s no need to ‘Mr Harrold’ or ‘Sir’ me.

I’ve been told that you’re going to be reading my novel Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away From The Circus (And Joined The Library). I hope you enjoy it and aren’t so tired after reading the title (which is, I’ll admit, a little longer than many titles you find these days) that you never get round to reading the book. I think you’re going to enjoy it, especially the bit where Fizzlebert finds the golden ticket and gets to visit the chocolate factory, but is accidentally kidnapped by robots (who mistake him for the dog who rules the world) before he can even get there. That bit’s very funny…