Free The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas by R. A. Spratt

that’s more like it!’ said Nanny Piggins, perking up. ‘Who has he hired? A balloon animal artist? A juggler? A magician? Someone who breathes fire?’
    ‘No,’ said Derrick, ‘he provides the entertainment himself. When the conversation hits a lull he gets up and does a one-hour presentation on the latest breakthroughs in tax auditing.’
    ‘No,’ gasped Nanny Piggins, thoroughly appalled.
    ‘With an overhead projector to demonstrate graphs and charts,’ added Samantha.
    ‘That’s dreadful,’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘Someone should tell Santa. He would come and take Mr Green’s presents back.’
    ‘Santa only gave him one pair of socks this year,’ said Michael.
    ‘Which was more than he deserved,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Santa probably only gave them to him because he can smell the stinky socks he usually wears all the way to the North Pole.’
    (Dear Reader, to be strictly accurate, Mr Green’s feet did not smell that bad. At least, no worse than any man whose wife has mysteriously gone missing and therefore has no-one to tell him off for not doing the laundry as often as he should. But you have to remember that, as a pig, Nanny Piggins has an extraordinary sense of smell, a thousand times stronger than a human’s. So she could be a little overly harsh and judgemental when it came to odour.)
    ‘Well, I’m not standing for this,’ said Nanny Piggins, contradicting her statement by getting to her feet. ‘If your father is going to allow his dreadful relatives into this house then I shall have to take action.’
    ‘Are we going out?’ asked Michael.
    ‘No, I shall invite my own family over,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘All of them?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘Yes,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘all thirteen of my identical fourteenuplet sisters. They are so extraordinary and brilliant it will counteract the drabness of the Greens, balancing out the potential social disaster and hopefully creating a normal pleasant gathering.’
    ‘I thought you didn’t know how to contact your sisters?’ said Samantha.
    ‘I don’t,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but Wendy will know.’
    ‘Which sister is she?’ asked Michael.
    ‘Is she the devious computer genius with a vendetta against the chess community?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘That’s Deidre,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘Or the amoral kleptomaniac with a passion for apricot danishes?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘No, that’s Anthea,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘Or the messy-haired biographer who tried to take over the world by stealing your mother’s cake recipes?’ asked Michael.
    ‘No, no, no, that’s Nadia,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Wendy is the evil super-spy who tried to throw me out of an aeroplane.’
    ‘Oh, her,’ said the children.
    ‘She uses her contacts in the espionage business to keep tabs on us all,’ explained Nanny Piggins.
    ‘Why?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘In case she falls too deeply into fudge debt and has to blackmail one of us to raise the money to pay off her fudge supplier,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘I didn’t know she had a fudge problem,’ said Derrick.
    ‘I didn’t say she had a problem,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I said she periodically ate so much fudge she racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. It is very judgemental of you to assume that is a “problem”.’
    ‘Sorry,’ said Derrick.
    ‘And I happen to know for a fact that she has been tapping our telephone,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘Because you can hear clicking sounds on the line?’ asked Michael. (He had watched lots of police television programs so he knew all about such things.)
    ‘Partly,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but mostly because of the distinctive sound of an evil pig eating fudge.’
    Nanny Piggins lifted the handset of the telephone. ‘Wendy, I know you are there listening . . . Stopping chewing does not conceal the fact that you are there . . . I can smell the fudge down the phone line.’
    ‘Can she do that?’ asked Samantha, worried about the time she