1. Answer: small ones.
2. Note to non-dog people: this is friendly. Dogs like it. Note to non-human people: humans don’t like it. Scratching humans between the ears is not considered friendly and shouldn’t be attempted without asking permission first.
3. This does not mean a lorry that talks posh. That would be an articulate lorry, which is another matter altogether. An articulated lorry is one that bends in the middle, which has no bearing on the vehicle’s verbal skills. All humans bend in the middle, as you probably know, yet some are far more articulate than others. Penguins do not bend in the middle, and are also strikingly inarticulate, but their lack of bendiness is probably not to blame.
4. Uglily isn’t a word. You know that. I know that. Let’s just move on.
5. Take note. You may find this information useful in after life. On the other hand, you may not.
6. ‘Who is Fizzer?’ I hear you ask. ‘Is he Hannah’s dog? Or somebody else’s? How did he get to be so preposterously clever? Is he working for the government?’ Patience, my friends, patience. All will be revealed. Probably.
7. This is a very special sack of potatoes we’re talking about here, but let’s not rule anything out. Life is full of surprises.
8. The number of ‘R’s is variable, depending on how well you know her time of day and humidity.
9. Hardly anyone actually knows what ‘svengali’ means, but that doesn’t matter because just the sound of the word tells you everything you need to know. A svengali as you can probably guess, is somebody who is wise and important and powerful and ever so slightly sinister.
10. It is hard to tell when a paving slab becomes excited, but if you look very very carefully it is possible to spot the difference. There is a slight temperature rise and occasionally a jiggle. A clue is the sight of ants (who hate excitement) running for their lives, in search of somewhere boring.
11. If this comment causes offence to any fish who happen to be reading this book, I apologise. My use of the term ‘fishy’ is not intended to be in any way disrespectful towards our ocean-dwelling friends.
12. Let’s have a little chat, down here at the bottom of the page where none of the characters can hear us. Would you like to know what the prize is? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not a prize at all. In fact, it is something rather horrible that nobody in their right mind would ever want, and even people in their wrong mind would try to avoid.
13. Nothing nothing nothing. Not anything. Zero. Nil. Zilch. Naught. Nada. Niente. Diddlysquat. Nothing.
14. Wollycobbles are similar to collywobbles but MUCH WORSE.
15. ‘Speaking of which,’ I hear you say, ‘You’ve still not told us who Fizzer is. Where does he keep appearing from? Where does he go?’ Patience, my friends. Patience.
16. ‘What is a mortal coil,’ you ask, ‘and why is he shuffling off it?’ This is a posh way of saying that Billy’s snuffed it, or pretended to, and has done so in such a theatrical way that he deserves a theatrical description of his efforts. I’ve nicked this phrase from a play called Hamlet, so if you think it’s no good don’t blame me.
17. A short while is precisely seven seconds. A while is sixteen seconds. A long while is one and a half minutes. This has been agreed at an international conference of timekeepers. Ages is thirty-seven minutes, blooming ages is fifty-two minutes and yonks is 2.3 years. Decision on a final definition of jiffy has been delayed until next year, due to an unseemly episode involving heckling, a jug of iced water and a frenzied kerfuffle of fisticuffs.
18. The snore of a female camel, curiously enough, sounds exactly like a woman sawing through a tree trunk. This has been conclusively proved by the experiments of Professor Zzzz at the Western Sahara College of Lumberjacking, though a rival study by Doctor Hump of the Saskatchewan Institute of Dromedary Studies disputes these findings. Hump and Zzzzz regularly exchange angry letters.
19. You know which dog, don’t you? Of course you do.
20. Psst! Have you guessed what the prize-that-isn’t-a-prize is yet? If you have, you are very clever. If you haven’t, you are possibly also clever, but are lacking insight into the criminal mind, and into the techniques of burglary. Ooops! I’ve given it away. If you still haven’t guessed now, you should probably rule out a career in the police force.
21. Ineffable means indescribable. But once you have used this word, you have described the thing you are saying you can’t describe, so it is therefore a pointless term and should probably be removed from all dictionaries. There is really no excuse for using it in a book, in particular a book for children. My reason for using it here is, frankly, ineffable.
22. ‘Sporting’, in this context, is a verb. I should make it clear that the shoes Armitage is sporting are not sporting shoes, and never could be, unless the sport was competitive foot-only balloon bursting, or a how-far-can-you-point-without-using-your-hands contest. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, the point is that he’s not sporting sporting shoes, he’s sporting non-sporting shoes.
23. This paragraph breaks the world record for the highest number of uses of the word ‘prance’, previously held by the first paragraph of A Prancer’s Guide to Prancing by Peter Prettyfoot.
24. A speleologist is somebody who explores caves. Jesse, by the way, was also a claustrophobic, which is somebody who hates confined spaces, so he would have hated being speleologist almost as much as being a human cannonball, but he still would have preferred it to being a thief.
25. I have an uncle who collects cacophones. These are Victorian machines for playing cacophonies, which used to be recorded on brass discs roughly the size of a dinner plate, and are thought to be the loudest hand-powered device ever built. A cacophone looks a bit like a half-straightened-out tuba connected to a pair of bellows, a crank and a foot pump. They are very hard to find. Even my uncle, president of the International Society of Cacophonists, only has two.
26. Nobody actually knows what ‘woe betide’ means.
27. Mathematicians among you may be thinking that a centipede can only scratch a maximum of fifty feet at any given time, since you need one leg to scratch the other. Not so. An abrasive surface can be used.
28. To convert that into metric measurements, ‘inches’ here means ‘centimetres’. ‘Centimetres’ however, is an ugly word, and makes it sound like I have got a tape measure and figured out the exact distance between the noses and feet in question, which I haven’t, so I’m going to stick with ‘inches’. If vagueness (or imperial measurements) annoy you, here is a suggested nose-to-foot distance: 7.3 cm.
29. Philosophosophising is like philosophising, which is like thinking, only more so. People who are really deep sometimes philosophosophososphisticise, but only after years of training.
30. This doesn’t mean there was a group of people playing bingo inside the truck. I just means the key turned and the door swung open.
31. In fact, Jesse would have been miserable as a fisherman. Yup. You guessed it. Seasickness. He could catch it in a pedalo. Even a deep bath made him slightly queasy.
32. Literally flaming. Not as in, ‘I’ve stubbed my flaming toe’, but as in, ‘the Olympics is started with a flaming torch.’
33. These people are all geniuses, which is a fancy way of saying they did something nobody else had thought of before, or did something familiar in a radically new way. There are four novelists, three composers, two scientists, poets, playwrights, film directors and painters; an explorer, a mathematician, a psychoanalyst, an astronomer, an engineer, a businessman, a philosopher, a footballer, a queen and a sculptor. If you want to know who did what, you can look them up. You could also ask an adult, but you might get a very long answer, with lots of complaints about who is and isn’t mentioned.
34. In fact, you don’t need a law degree at all. Unless you want to be a lawyer. And who wants that?
35. ‘But who is Fizzer?!’ I hear you yell, really quite annoyed now. Then, miraculously, like the sun bursting out from behind a cloud, all anger vanishes from your voice. ‘Oh, I get it!’ you exclaim, joyously. ‘This is, like, a mystery! A puzzle! There’s no answer! Fizzer is who is he is. That’s all there is to it. He’s an enigma dog. A conundrum canine. He comes when he comes and he goes when he goes. Wow! That’s so cool! This is just the best book I’ve ever read!’