Bedtime Stories with R.A. Spratt

A Tall Tale about the Extinction of the Dinosaurs... and Cherry Blossum

May 19, 2021 R.A. Spratt Season 1 Episode 65
Bedtime Stories with R.A. Spratt
A Tall Tale about the Extinction of the Dinosaurs... and Cherry Blossum
Show Notes Transcript

When Mum and Tammy are walking to school they spot a small spring of cherry blossum, which makes them wonder about the real cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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Hello and welcome to ‘Bedtime Stories’ with me, R.A. Spratt.  Today’s story is… 

 

‘A tall tale about the extinction of the dinosaurs… and cherry blossom’.

 

Here we go…

 

Mum and Tammy were walking to school. Normally when they walked to school they were rushing, because Mum needed to get back home so she could drive to the gym. 

Mum considered going to the gym to be vitally important. To be honest, the rest of the family thought Mum going to the gym was vitally important too. Because Mum could be in a very bad mood if she didn’t get to burn her rage off by lifting up heavy things.

But today, was different. Mum was not rushing off to the gym. Because her legs hurt so much from the last five days she had been to the gym, soshe was having a rest day. 

She didn’t like taking rest days. But she bravely endured them – because she did have a job, so it was probably for the best if she paid a little bit of attention to doing that as well.

Anyway, as a result of all this, Mum and Tammy were walking to school and for once they were not rushing. They weren’t fighting either. 

They had been five minutes earlier. Because Tammy had lost her school jumper. 

Mum was usually understanding about Tammy losing things. Mum was a loser of things herself. But she had bought Tammy two jumpers to double her chances of being able to find one. 

And she had ironed name tags on the label of the jumper as well as on the outside of the collar. To make sure that anyone else trying to wear Tammy’s jumpers would be clearly labelling themselves as a thief. 

Tammy was very upset with herself for losing both hear clearly labelled jumpers. But when Tammy was upset she did not like to express her emotions in the normal way – with regret or remorse. She liked to go straight to wailing and bemoaning.

Over the years Mum had learned that there was no way to stop Tammy’s wailing and bemoaning ritual. Reasoning certainly never worked. Cajoaling or bribery never broke her stride. And threatening or yelling back certainly never worked – although Mum sometimes found it cathartic to get her feelings off her chest too. 

But in the end, the jumper related hysteria had been cut short, when Mum had found one of Tammy’s jumpers. 

This had of course, only made Tammy even angrier with her. There is nothing more infuriating than someone who is right and triumphant. 

But Mum was in such a good mood about her success and the sunniness of the day she forgave Tammy, and didn’t even make her sing the ‘Mummy’s always right song’. Although she did hum a few bars herself. And they were both soon walking happily to school. 

 

It was a beautiful day. It was cold, but the sun was shining, the grass was green, everything looked lovely. It had rained the night before and Stanley always loved the smell of everything when it had rained. Damp things smelled so much better to dogs.

They were just about to turn a corner when Mum spotted something.

‘Look at that,’ said Mum. ‘There’s a cherry blossom.’

Tammy kept walking. Mum did not go anywhere. ‘Look at that,’ said Mum. ‘Admire it.’

Tammy sighed and walked back to look at the flower. It was just a small sprig coming out of the base of the over pruned cherry tree by the side of the road at a busy junction. This tree obviously had a hard life. But one valiant sprig was flowering. It had little white flowers with pink high lights. Tammy looked at it. 

‘Admire, admire, admire,’ said Tammy. She knew it was easier to appease Mum. Mum wasn’t above wrestling even this early in the morning if she thought one of her children wasn’t admiring nature as much as they should be.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ said Mum. ‘You know in Japan, big corporations have days where they give the whole staff the day off to have a picnic under the cherry blossums and admire their beauty.’

‘You couldn’t fit a whole corporate staff under that one twig,’ said Tammy. The tiny sprig was only about 40 centimetres off the ground. ‘You couldn’t even get one person under there.’

‘You could if they lay on their back and scooched in,’ argued Mum.

‘Huh,’ said Tammy.

‘You shouldn’t underestimate flowers,’ said Mum. ‘They killed the dinosaurs you know.’

‘That flower killed the dinosaurs?’ asked Tammy.

‘Well not that flower specifically,’ said Mum. ‘Although if there was a dinosaur here, it might kill it because there is a whole school of thought that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the evolution of flowers.’

‘I thought an asteroid hitting the world caused a giant dust cloud that caused an ice age and that killed off the dinosaurs,’ said Tammy.

‘That’s the commonly held believe,’ conceded Mum. ‘But there is a whole school of thought that perhaps it was flowers that did it. You see when dinosaurs were thriving on the earth there were no flowers. They hadn’t evolved yet. Imagine that a whole world full of ferns and trees and grass but no flowers.’

‘It would make it very hard to shop for gifts on Mother’s Day,’ said Tammy.

‘Good point,’ said Mum. ‘That must have been difficult for dinosaurs too.’

‘Perhaps that’s why Tyranosaurs Rex were always so angry,’ said Tammy. ‘No one ever gave them flowers.’

‘You should write a paper about that for a palaeontology magazine,’ said Mum. ‘But anyway, the evolution of the first flowering plants coincides exactly with the demise of the dinosaurs. So there is a school of thought that it was the flowers that killed them.’

Tammy looked at the tiny sprig of cherry blossom. ‘How on earth could a tiny flower kill a great big dinosaur?’

‘I don’t really know,’ admitted Mum. ‘It’s not my theory.’

Tammy looked at her. 

‘Seriously,’ said Mum. ‘I didn’t make it up. A real scientist did. I heard about it on the radio.’

Tammy raised her eyebrows. It was hard to tell when Mum made things up or when they were true, largely because Mum got so carried away with her alternative realities she started to believe them herself. 

Mum didn’t think being fictional was a reason not to believe something. She argued that fictional ideas and people were more real that a lot of people she knew. But Mum lived her life in a parrallel universe of her own imagination so Tammy knew to take everything she said with not just a grain of salt, but an entire a dump truck of salt.

‘They don’t look deadly dangerous,’ said Tammy.

‘Perhaps dinosaurs had really bad hay fever,’ said Mum, her eyes lighting up with delight at her own idea.

‘And they wouldn’t be able to blow their noses because their arms didn’t reach their faces,’ said Tammy, as she mimed a T-Rex trying to blow it’s nose.

‘They didn’t have opposable thumbs either,’ said Mum. ‘So imagine how hard it would be to pull a tissue out of a tissue box without opposable thumbs!’

‘It would be a nightmare,’ said Tammy.

‘The snot would just have to run down their faces,’ said Mum.

‘Gross,’ said Tammy.

‘Yes, because think how much snot you generate when you have a cold,’ said Mum. ‘And you’re only five foot tall. A T-Rex is much bigger than you. They’d produce gallons of snot.’

‘A diplodocus is even bigger,’ said Tammy.

‘They’d be oozing bath tub loads of snot,’ said Mum. ‘And it would all be oozing down their faces.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Tammy. ‘Can we stop talking about it.’

‘And their arms would be too short to rub Vick vapour rub on their chests,’ said Mum.

‘And they didn’t have fingers so they wouldn’t be able to use nasal spray,’ said Tammy.

‘No,’ agreed Mum. ‘They’d have to put the nasal spray bottle of the ground and try to fall on it at exactly the right angle so that it went up their nostril.’

‘That could go horribly wrong,’ said Tammy.

‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘Lots of nasal spray getting imbedded in dinosaur eyes.’

‘Did they have chicken soup?’ asked Tammy.

‘Well there were birds in the time of the dinosaurs,’ said Mum. ‘But how would they pluck them with no opposable thumbs.’

‘And did they have noodles?’ asked Tammy. ‘There’s no point having chicken soup unless it’s chicken noodle soup.’

‘And there was no daytime television,’ said Mum. ‘So the poor sick dinosaurs would have had nothing to do.’

‘No couch to lie on either,’ said Tammy.

‘So these poor giant reptiles were forced to walk the planet covered in their own snot, dehydrated from lack of chicken soup and with nasal spray bottles embedded in their eyes. It’s no wonder they became extinct.’

‘It’s hard to find a girlfriend to settle down with if you were a mess like that,’ said Tammy.

‘And therefore, impossible to continue the survival of the species under those conditions,’ said Mum.

They both looked at the little sprig of cherry blossom.

‘So that flower is a murderer,’ said Tammy.

‘Yes,’ agreed Mum. ‘But a very pretty murderer.’ 

‘Is that why people put flowers on graves?’ asked Tammy. 

‘To make sure that the deceased is dead?’ asked Mum. ‘Maybe.’

With that settled they kept walking to school.

 

The end.

 

Thank you for listening. To support this podcast just buy a book by me RA Spratt. There are plenty to choose from, across the Friday Barnes, Nanny Piggins and Peski Kids series. And now there are the audio books of The Adventures of Nanny Piggins and Friday Barnes, Girl Detective as well. You can order any of these things through your local bookstore. Or go to my website raspratt.com and click on the Book Depository banner. They have all my titles and free international shipping. 

 

That’s it for now, until next time. Goodbye.