Armadillo Blog

Friday 3rd June part 2 – Zombaliens attack

2:30pm – the Starlight Tent, in grave danger

Guy Bass, creator of Dinkin Dings (who is scared of everything), was so kind as to save his audience’s lives, by teaching them how to defend themselves against Zombaliens.

He started by asking what everyone was scared of. Answers ranged from my teacher, my Mum (someone in the audience’s, not mine), spiders, DEATH, needles, and a rat. A specific rat.

This is nothing compared to Dinkin’s list of 47 most feared things in the first book, Dinkin Dings and the Frightening Things (which everyone must read).

There are, Guy said. three things you need to know about Zombaliens:
1. They want to turn everyone into a Zombalien
2. They disguise themselves as humans
3. They use lemon juice and furniture polish to disguise their true smell (gone-off milk and old ladies’ knickers)

A volunteer named Bruce was called on to test Dinkin’s Zombatron6000 Zombalien defeating hat (complete with plunger for pulling off the human disguise mask) and Bruce performed some top-quality sneaking on Guy Bass.

We were introduced to the frightening things (Edgar the skeleton, Herbert the monster and Arhur the ghost – Dinkin’s frienda and the only things he’s not frightened of) and more volunteers (for simplicity Guy called them all Sophie) took on the roles of the frightening things. With some sound-effect-help from the audience they performed the arrival of the frightening things from the first book.

I almost ran screaming in terror from the tent, but managed to keep in my seat long enough to get a sneak preview of Guy’s next book, Stitch Head, which is about a mad professor’s first invention.

Guy read from the new book to round off a fantastic event – he is basically a stand up comedian in a children’s writer’s body. I queued up afterwards to get my Dinkin book signed and told Guy it was nice to meet him in person as opposed to on Twitter. Then I said

‘Tomorrow I’ll be back to following you all day’

Which probably sounded a bit scary.

In true half-term style, I was back in time to watch Home and Away and give the cat lots of food to make it like me. It remains unimpressed.