Dear Kitty and Noel Templestein,

On behalf of our school, we (Jimmy Cook and Alice Toolie) would like to say we are soooooooooooooooo sorry for what happened on your author visit to our school.

Firstly, we are REALLY sorry that you were left down in student reception waiting for us for soooooo long. You see, we were actually there earlier to get you and take you to the library, but we accidentally collected the wrong people. It turns out we’d brought up the photocopy repairman and Greg Toogle’s mother, who were waiting in reception before you even arrived. I guess we didn’t know what you looked like exactly because there aren’t many pictures of you on Goople and that’s why we took the wrong people.

Anyway, we ended up taking them to the library and giving them the microphones and it took a while for us to realise they weren’t you because as it turns out the photocopier repairman had a lot of interesting stories and who knew that Greg Toogle’s grandfather was in the Commonwealth Games synchronised swimming team in 1852? Once we realised that they weren’t you, we tried very hard to stop them talking but it was super tricky because Derek Froon kept asking questions about how to photocopy his butt.

So then we raced down to get the REAL Kitty and Noel Templestein, but by THAT time Noel had been taken to the staffroom to fix a printer and Kitty was stuck in a meeting with the Vice Principal about how Greg Toogle has not been wearing undies to school on Fridays because he insists that Friday is International No Undies Friday (INUF).

So finally, we found you both and everyone was sooooo sorry that there had been this terrible mix-up but also super grateful that you’d fixed all the photocopiers and agreed to talk to Greg about stopping No Undies Fridays.

So that’s why Ms Murtle (our school librarian) told us to take you to the library staffroom for a cup of tea and a sandwich before you finally started the REAL author talk. BUT we didn’t know that Ms Murtle had ACCIDENTALLY cut up Jimmy’s science experiment sandwich that he was using to grow space mould on from the library fridge!

And then when you finally did start your author talk, we only had time for the question box but somehow that had got mixed up too and everyone thought it was a suggestion box for the canteen so all the questions were asking things like When are we getting strawberry slushoos in the canteen? and can’t we have nachos every day? It was really nice that you tried to answer all those questions but the bad thing was they weren’t really about your books!

And in the end we didn’t get to hear ANYTHING about your books because that’s when that mouldy space sandwich must have started to make Noel super sick because then Noel ran off to the emergency toilet in the middle of the author talk! And it was SOOOOOOO SUPER EXTRA BAD because Noel still had the headset microphone on when he went to the emergency toilet and let me tell you, it did not sound very good. And I think the whole school can agree on that!

Anyway, we all hope you’ll come back one day! We still really liked your author talk and all your advice about nachos and thanks heaps for fixing the photocopier.

Yours truly,

Alice and Jimmy