Barry Loser Hates Half Term. Jim Smith

me at Mogden Pier!’ I wailed, and I wound the window up again and went back to comperleeterly unenjoying my half term.

      ‘Ferry leaves in four minutes,’ said my dad, screeching to a halt next to Mogden Pier, and I sat in my seat wondering why my dad always says everything’s gonna be FOUR minutes, and not three, or five.

      ‘Maybe it’s because he’s got FOUR fingers,’ I mumbled to myself, as my dad undid his seatbelt. ‘Maybe if he had seventeen fingers, everything would take SEVENTEEN minutes instead!’

      I think I was just trying to put off getting out of the car.

      My dad walked round to Desmond’s door and lifted him out, careful not to make his back go snap again. ‘Come on, Barry, out you pop too,’ he chirped, trying not to sound like a horrible dad who was sending his number one son off to a prison camp on an island in the middle of a lake with none of his friends for the whole of half term.

      I slid myself out of the car and collapsed in a heap of Barryness on the tarmac.

      ‘Pleeease don’t make me go to Pirate Camp!’ I cried, as a little girl from about three million years below me at school walked past with her mum on the way to the ferry, giggling at my loserosity.

      ‘Sorry, Barry,’ said my dad, holding Desmond’s bum up to his nostrils, checking if he’d done another poo. ‘Maybe when your Great Aunt Mildred’s nose shrinks back to normal and your mum comes home we can have another think.’

      The tarmac rumbled and Bunky and Nancy skidded their bikes to a stop and jumped off, panting from cycling all the way to Mogden Pier in less time than it takes to say this sentence.

      ‘What in the name of unkeelness is going on here?’ said Bunky, and I explained to him and Nancy how my dad was sending me to Pirate Camp because we’d been jumping up and down on my mum and dad’s bed the day before.

      ‘. . . so really it’s kind of you two’s fault as well,’ I said, getting up from the tarmac and heaving my rucksack out of the boot. My orange tent was strapped to the bottom, with the word ‘LOSER’ written on it in big black capitals.

      ‘But Pirate Camp is for kiddywinkles!’ said Bunky, and my dad was just about to open his mouth and say his thing about how that meant I’d fit in there just perfectly, when I spotted the tip of Darren Darrenofski’s nose.