Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice by R. A. Spratt Page B

temperature. If anything else needed warming up she would just give it a good squeeze with her curling tongs. (She had an extra pair of curling tongs specifically for heating food.)
    But on this morning, when the children burst into her room, they did not find Nanny Piggins surrounded by food, just putting the finishing touches on a profiterole tower. Instead she was lying in the middle of her bed, staring at the ceiling.
    ‘What’s wrong, Nanny Piggins?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘Are you sick?’ worried Samantha.
    ‘Has someone broken into your bedroom and superglued you to your bed?’ asked Michael.
    ‘No, I can move and I’m not sick,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But something is wrong.’
    ‘You can’t decide what to wear?’ guessed Boris.
    ‘Worse than that,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    Boris gasped. ‘What could possibly be worse than not knowing what to wear?’ (This just goes to show what an empathetic bear Boris was, because he did not even wear clothes himself.)
    ‘I can’t think what to do,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘Normally when I wake up in the morning my mind is bubbling with ideas for adventures and fun. But this morning when I opened my eyes, all I could think was: nothing.’
    ‘How can you think nothing?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Nanny Piggins. ‘But I am forever doing extraordinary things I did not know I was capable of. And thinking of nothing must just be another one.’
    ‘Perhaps if you ate some cake,’ suggested Samantha.
    ‘I tried that,’ said Nanny Piggins, pointing towards the dozens of Swiss roll packets strewn across the floor. ‘And while that certainly made me feel better about thinking of nothing, it didn’t help me think of something.’
    ‘Do you want us to take you to the doctor?’ asked Michael.
    ‘Pish to that!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘A doctor is hardly the person you turn to for original ideas. They wouldn’t know how to tie their shoelaces if they hadn’t been taught it at medical school. Which, incidentally, is why so many doctors wear loafers.’
    ‘Then what are we going to do?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘Do you want us to stay home so we can look after you?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘Obviously you should all stay home from school,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘But not so you can look after me. So you can help me, because I’ve had an idea about how to come up with an idea.’
    ‘You have?’ asked Derrick suspiciously.
    ‘It’s not going to be dangerous, is it?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘Of course not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Well, not very.’
    Five minutes later Nanny Piggins was standing in the backyard (still wearing her pyjamas) while Boris and the children hung out of the second storey window directly above, with a great big bucket of apples. (They did not have any apples in the house but Mrs Simpson next door did have several apple trees, so Nanny Piggins thought it would be an act of kindness if they were to pick them for her. Nanny Piggins assumed Mrs Simpson shared her belief that fruit and vegetables were an eyesore in any garden.)
    ‘I think this is a terrible idea,’ worried Samantha.
    ‘Nonsense,’ scoffed Nanny Piggins. ‘If having an apple drop on his head gave Isaac Newton the idea of gravity, just think what it will do for me.’
    ‘What exactly is gravity?’ asked Michael.
    ‘It’s the reason –’ sobbed Boris, breaking down into tears, ‘we weigh so much when we stand on the bathroom scales.’
    ‘There, there,’ comforted Samantha. ‘I’m sure the scales are wrong. They are probably broken.’
    ‘They were definitely broken after Boris stood on them,’ said Derrick under his breath.
    ‘I’m sure being hit by an apple will help me come up with something much more interesting than one of the fundamental laws of physics,’ said Nanny Piggins confidently. ‘At the very least, a new apple strudel recipe.’
    ‘But won’t it hurt?’ asked Samantha, holding a Granny Smith in her hand and thinking that the