Free Grimble at Christmas by Quentin Blake

1. Seven Shopping
Days to Christmas
    Grimble's parents were very forgetful. This was
sometimes annoying, but having a forgetful
father and mother also had advantages. For
instance it meant that he had better bedtimes than
most other children.Quite often he used to go into
his father's room and say, "I'm going to bed now;
it's midnight," and his father would say, "Don't
wait up for me," or "Iquique is the only town I
know with two qs!"
    For most of the year Grimble – Grimble was his
whole name, his parents had forgotten to give
him any other names – rather enjoyed having a
father and mother who were different from those
of the other boys at school, but when it came to
Christmas there were very definite disadvantages.
    Grimble had only two more days of school
before the Christmas holidays started – and the old
Grimbles went around as if it were the middle of
February or the end of August; anyway there was
nothing special about the way they went around.
The shops in the High Street had windows decorated
with lights and Father Christmases and
wrapped-up packages and mince pies and a big
notice saying ONLY SEVEN MORE SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS on which the number of days
before the twenty-fifth was changed every evening
. . . it was very exciting.
    And Grimble's mother went out with a big
shopping bag – and came back with a cabbage, and
one and a half pounds of cod fillets. I don't want to
be unkind about cod fillets. They are perfectly all
right but they just do not make you tingle all over.
Anyway they didn't make Grimble tingle all over.
    Grimble had a friend called David Sebastian
Waghorn whose mother had said, "We are going to
have cold turkey on Boxing Day." That is just about
the same as saying, "On Christmas Day, we are
going to have hot roast turkey with stuffing and
gravy and sausages and bacon and roast potatoes
and Brussels sprouts."He waited anxiously for Mrs
Grimble to give some small hint like that. The
evening before she had said, "We haven't got a cat,"
and Mrs Grimble said, "Oh dear nor we have, don't
forget to leave her a saucer of milk."
    Grimble watched his parents carefully for any
sign that they might have remembered why he was
going to be on holiday and when, and what sort
of treats he was going to get if he was going to
get treats. He worked hard giving them wellmannered
hints because it was terribly important
to him that Christmas would be, well . . . complete.
    One evening he dropped a lot of pine needles on
the carpet . . . but as no one noticed or said anything
and Grimble was very tidy, he got a dustpan
and brush and swept them up again a couple of
days later.
    Also he tried to hum "Good King Wenceslaus"
. . . mm mmmmmmmm mm mmmmmm m but
he did not hum very well and his father thinking it
was "God Save The Queen," stood up and when
Grimble had finished humming his father turned
off the television set and went to bed.
    So he practised humming some more. David
Sebastian Waghorn had a joke about humming.
"Do you know why humming birds hum? Because
they don't know the words." Grimble thought
David Sebastian Waghorn was a very funny boy.
    The day before, Mr Grimble had come into the
house with a large square parcel and Grimble,
knowing that it was not polite to be openly curious,
had gone into the kitchen and watched his father
take the parcel into the study through the slightly
open door. It looked as if it might be a bicycle
taken to pieces or a large box kite or possibly a new
kind of cooker.

    That evening his father said, "Come into the
study and see what I've got in my parcel. It's a footstool,
I gave it to me . . ." and Grimble had
clenched his teeth and said, "Now you can lie back
in your chair and don't even have to bend your
legs." His father was delighted that Grimble had
got the point of the footstool so quickly and
showed him where Iquique was on the globe of
the world . . . it was about halfway down South
America on the left-hand side.
    "Do you expect to get anything else for
Christmas