CHAPTER 9

Dear Earthling,

I was interested to read in your last letter about the self-defence class you go to on Earth called “karate.” It sounds very different than the self-defence that Murder Evans taught us at Space Cadets last week, which involved a lot of forward rolls.

For example, you wrote about blocking attacks with your fists and attempting to chop your opponent with the side of your hand. Murder Evans said that if someone comes at us we should either crumple to the ground and play dead, or try to distract them with a fiddly task such as doing up buttons.

I’m not entirely convinced these tactics would work on Stabwell Phillips, so I’m going to study karate instead. I showed Andi your letter, and he’s also interested. We’ve decided to form an after school karate club, and handed out flyers yesterday at munch-time.

To be perfectly honest, I do have another motive (apart from defending myself from Stabwell and his arm of evil), as I’ve noticed that Killian seems to enjoy swinging people around by their collars if they’re getting on her nerves (namely me). She did intentionally poke me in the eye last week (I probably deserved it as I was looking through her letterbox at the time. Although I wouldn’t have been doing that if she’d have just opened the door after I’d been stood there knocking for so long), so I think karate might be her sort of thing.

Anyway, I pushed a load of flyers through the letter slot on her door on the way home from school just in case (keeping my eyes well out of the way this time).

Andi and I decided to have a practice meeting last night to set up the rules so that we’d seem more professional when we’re inundated with members. That didn’t go too well as we argued the whole time.

Firstly, Andi wants to call the club The Karate Kids—a silly name that I am positive will never take off.

Secondly, just because Andi is supplying the karate club headquarters (his garden shed) he seems to think he’s in charge of deciding the rules, so to keep it fair we played a game called bap, sandwich, bread sticks. Do you know it? Sandwich beats bap, bap beats breadsticks and breadsticks beats sandwich.

Fortunately I won (Andi won the first two games, so I talked him into doing best of five) and here are the rules I came up with:

1. One dollop each week to be paid by all members to cover training costs (i.e. my bus fare to Andi’s house).
2. Maximum of ten members in the club (it’s not a very big shed).
3. Andi to make up a suitable song to sing at the start of each meeting (this was Andi’s rule actually—I let him have his way because by then he’d started to sulk).
4. The club is going to be called Karate Party as I like rhyming words and also think it sounds like a lot of fun, which could potentially attract more members.

We’ve decided to have the first meeting next When?sday after school. I can hardly wait! I’ll let you know how it went in my next letter.

Your friend,

Dethbert Jones

P.S. I’ve just realized that I actually know very little about karate, so could you write and tell me all about it soon please?