THE SINGING HIPPO

Once upon a time, a hippopotamus lived in a river next to a big and solitary tree.

One day, a bird came and nested in the tree. The songs and the flight of the bird caused such envy in the hippo that he couldn’t think of anything else. Every day he would lament the fact that he had been born a hippo. This, despite the many times the bird told the hippo he was so lucky to be so big and such a good swimmer.

Finally, the hippo made his mind up that he would come out of the river, climb the tree, go out to perch on a branch, and start singing. However, when he tried to climb the tree it was all too clear that the hippo didn’t have wings, nor claws to climb with, and neither could he hop.

Realising that he would never manage it, he angrily rammed his whole weight against the tree until it came crashing to the ground. Then, triumphantly, he stepped onto the leaves of the fallen tree, and began singing.

Unfortunately, hippos can’t sing either. All that came from his mouth were horrible noises, and when the other animals heard this they all gathered round to make fun of the hippo standing on the branch of a fallen tree, trying to sing like a bird.

He was so embarrassed by this that he decided to never again regret being a hippo. He also felt bad about having knocked the tree over. He used all his strength to raise the tree back up again, replant it, and look after it until it had completely recovered.

THE INCREDIBLE BLACK RAIN

Gus Grumplings was never happy with anything. He had lots of friends, and parents who loved him dearly, but all Gus could think about was what he didn’t have, or things he did have which he was unhappy with. If someone gave him a car, it would be too big or too slow. If he went to the zoo, he’d come back disappointed because they hadn’t let him feed the lions. If he played football with his friends, he would complain, saying there were too many of them for just one ball…

What caught Gus unawares was Chuckles the prankster cloud. One day, Chuckles was drifting past, and heard all of Gus’s complaining. Chuckles wafted over to see. When the cloud was right above Gus, he started dropping heavy black rain on him. That was Chuckles’ favourite trick to play on grumpy little kids.

Gus wasn’t at all impressed by this new development; it just made him complain even more. He was even angrier after he realised that the cloud was following him.

Well, this carried on for almost a week. Gus couldn’t get away from the cloud, and he got more and more infuriated.

Gus had a little friend, a happy and generous girl called Gladys. Gladys was the only one who had been willing to hang around with Gus during all those black, rainy days. All the other children had run off to avoid getting soaked and ending up completely black.

One day, when Gus was at the end of his tether, she said to him: “Cheer up! What you should realise is that you’re the only one of us who has his very own cloud, and even better, its rain is black! We could play some fun games with a cloud like this, don’t you reckon?” As Gladys was his only company these days, and he didn’t want her to leave as the others had, Gus reluctantly agreed.

Gladys took him to the swimming pool, and left him there until all the pool water was black. Then she went and got other kids. They came and played in the pool. The water being black meant they could play hide and seek! Grudgingly, Gus had to admit it had been a lot of fun, but what was even more fun was playing Wet the Cat.

Gus would find cats and run alongside them. When the cats felt themselves getting wet they would jump about in the craziest way, and run off at top speed, with funny looks on their faces. Before long, all the children in town had gathered around Gus, thinking up new games they could play using the cloud.

For the first time ever, Gus started to see the positive side of things; even things which, at first, had seemed so bad. Chuckles, the prankster cloud, thought that he could now leave; his work had been done. But, before leaving, he gave Gus two days of multicoloured rain, with which the children invented the most fun games ever.

When Chuckles finally left, Gus didn’t complain. Now he knew to focus on the good in life, and the good thing about Chuckles’ departure was that no longer was Gus soaking wet all day. Now he could go and do dry things, and that’s exactly what he did.

MY LITTLE WORLD HAS BROKEN

Once upon a time there was a spring who lived happily and safely inside a pen. Although he heard many noises coming from outside, he lived believing that outside his world inside the pen, there was nothing good. Even just to think about leaving his pen made him so scared that he was quite content to spend his life compacting and stretching himself again and again inside that tiny space.

However, one day, the ink ran out, and when the pen’s owner was busy changing it, there was an accident. The spring was flung through the air and landed in the toilet drain, well out of sight. Terrified, and cursing his bad luck, the spring was flushed through pipe after pipe, each time thinking it might be his end. During the journey, he did not dare open his eyes out of pure fear. Nor did he every stop crying. Swept away by the water, he travelled on and on and on, until he ended up in a river. When the river current lost its force, and the spring could see that things had calmed down a bit, he stopped crying and listened all around him. Hearing birdsong and wind in the trees, he felt encouraged to finally open his eyes. What the spring saw was the pure, crystal waters of the river, the rich green rocks of the riverbed, and all kinds of fish of many colours, whose skin seemed to dance under the sunlight. Now he understood that the world was much greater than the space inside the pen, and that there had always been many things outside, waiting to be enjoyed.

After spending a while playing with the fish, he went over to the riverbank, and then moved on to a field of flowers. There he heard weeping. He followed the sound, which took him to a lovely flower that had been flattened by a rabbit, and could no longer stand up straight. The spring realised that he could help the flower, so he offered to be his support. The flower accepted, and slipped through the middle of the spring. There they lived happily together. And they would always laugh when remembering how the spring used to think that all there was to life was being a sad and fearful spring.

THE UNFRIENDLY RIVER

Once upon a time there was a river. This river was rather unfriendly and lonesome. The river could not remember how long ago he had decided that he no longer wanted to put up with anything or anyone. He lived alone, refusing to share his water with any fish, plant or animal.

And so his life went on, sadly and filled with loneliness, for many centuries.

One day, a little girl with a goldfish bowl came to the bank of this river. In the bowl lived Scamp, her favourite little fish. The girl was about to move to another country, and she wouldn’t be able to take Scamp with her. So she had decided to give Scamp his freedom.

When Scamp fell into the river, he immediately felt the river’s loneliness. Scamp tried talking to the river, but the river told Scamp to go away. Now, Scamp was a very happy little fish, and he wasn’t going to give up so easily. He asked and asked, swam and swam, and finally he started jumping in and out of the water.

The river, feeling all the jumping and splashing, started to laugh. It tickled!

After a while, this put the river in such a good mood that he started talking to Scamp. Almost without knowing it, by the end of that day, Scamp and the river had become very good friends.

The river spent that night thinking about how much fun it was to have friends, and how much he had missed by not having them. He asked himself why he had never had them, but he couldn’t remember.

The next morning, Scamp woke the river with a few playful splashes… and that was when the river remembered why he had decided to be such an unfriendly river:

He remembered that he was very ticklish, and that he wouldn’t have been able to stand it! Now he remembered perfectly how he had told everyone to scoot, that he wasn’t going to put up with all that tickling.

But, remembering how sad and lonely he had felt for so many years, the river realised that although it may sometimes be a bit inconvenient or uncomfortable, it was always better to have friends and to try to be happy.

THE TICKLING SCALES

One day, in the jungle, a set of bathroom scales appeared. The animals played with it for quite some time until a parrot who had escaped from the zoo explained to them how it worked. All the animals took turns to weigh themselves. At first this was a big game; every day each animal would see how much weight they had gained or lost. However, before long, many animals began to obsess about their weight. The first thing they would do each day would be to run to the scales, weigh themselves, and spend the rest of the day with a grumpy expression on their faces. This because, no matter what the scales said, the animals always weighed the same, in other words: “more than they wanted to”.

As the months passed, the scales began to suffer the animals’ disapproval. The scales were regularly kicked, or given poisonous looks. One day, the scales decided that from the following morning things would have to change.

That morning, the first to run to weigh itself was the zebra. However, as soon as it stepped onto the scales, the scales began tickling the zebra’s hooves. Soon the scales found just the right spot, and the zebra couldn’t stop giggling. This was so much fun for the zebra that from that day on it no longer worried about its weight, and off it went to happily eat its breakfast for the first time in ages. The same happened to whoever went to weigh themselves that day… so that, before long, no one was worried any longer about their weight. Rather, they all commented on how much fun the scales and its tickling were.

As the months and the years passed, the scales stopped reading weight and began reading good humour and optimism instead. Soon everyone happily discovered that this was a much better indicator of beauty and a person’s value. Finally, in the jungle everyone forgot about that antiquated and old-fashioned measurement known as the kilo.

A DAY WITH PIGS

There was once a boy who would never get dressed when his parents told him to, nor would he put on what they wanted him to after his bath. He preferred to dress in a much stranger manner, but above all, he liked to take his time. His parents were always in a rush, and wanted him to be a lot quicker, but the boy didn’t like this, and he would slow down even more.

One day, his parents were in their usual hurry, and they got so angry when he refused to dress, that they told him that he would have to go out naked. The boy didn’t mind this in the least. So out they went.

While the boy was standing naked outside his house, waiting for his parents to bring the car, along came the local pig farmer. The pig farmer was hard of hearing and had poor eyesight. Not only that, but he’d also forgotten to put his glasses on that day. When he saw the little boy’s pink skin, he thought it was one of his pigs. And, with a bit of shouting, prodding, and pushing, the farmer managed to get the boy safely back to a pigsty.

The boy protested the whole way there, but as the farmer was almost deaf, his complaints didn’t help him. And there he was for the whole day, living amongst the pigs, thought to be a pig, and sharing their food and home.

Finally, though, his parents found him. The boy had had such a regrettable day that never again did he want to be mistaken for anything other than a human being. Nowadays he’s the first to get dressed, and look perfectly neat and tidy, just like those children in the clothes catalogues

THE WARM WHALE

Gail the Whale lived in a small salty lake. She was the only whale in that territory, and she led a very comfortable life. In fact, this easy life made her a bit fussy. But, one year, there was such an incredibly hot summer that the lake’s water really warmed up. Gail, used to such an ideal existence, could hardly stand the hot water. A little fish, which had spent some time in a child’s goldfish bowl, told Gail that humans used fans to cool themselves down in summer. From then on, Gail the Whale couldn’t think of anything else apart from how to build her very own fan.

Everyone told her that she was overreacting, and that the hot weather would soon pass, but Gail got to work, constructing her enormous fan. When it was finally finished, she started fanning away at herself.

Unlucky for the fish! The giant fan beat the little lake’s waters so strongly that huge waves rolled right across it. The waves crashed onto the lakeshore, leaving the lake half empty, and Gail stranded in only a few inches of water.

“You couldn’t just hang on for while. You had to empty the lake,” some unhappy-looking fish berated her. “So impatient! So selfish!” others shouted. But the worst of it for Gail was not the insults, but the fact that with so little water around her, the heat was becoming unbearable. Preparing herself to die of heatstroke, she said her goodbyes to all her friends, and they asked for her forgiveness. She assured them all that if she were to live again she would be stronger and learn to put up with life’s discomforts.

Yet, once again, Gail the Whale was overreacting. She managed to survive those hot days without dying, although, of course, she suffered. When the next rains arrived, the lake filled up again, and the weather improved. Naturally, Gail had to keep her promise, and show everyone that she had learned not to be so dependent on comfort, so impatient, and so fussy.

THE MAGIC WINDOW

Once upon a time there was a little boy who became very ill. He had to spend all day in bed, unable to move. Because other children weren’t allowed to come near him, he suffered greatly, and spent his days feeling sad and blue.

There wasn’t much he could do except look out of the window. Time passed, and his feeling of despair just grew. Until one day he saw a strange shape in the window. It was a penguin eating a sausage sandwich. The penguin squeezed in through the open window, said “good afternoon” to the boy, turned around, and left again.

Of course, the boy was very surprised. He was still trying to work out what had happened, when outside his window he saw a monkey in a nappy, busy blowing up a balloon. At first the boy asked himself what that could possibly be, but after a while, as more and more crazy-looking characters appeared out the window, he burst out laughing and found it hard to stop.

Anyone wanting to stop laughing would never be helped by seeing a pig playing a tambourine, an elephant jumping on a trampoline, or a dog wearing a pair of glasses and talking about nothing except politics. The little boy didn’t tell anyone about this because who would have believed him? Even so, those strange characters ended up putting joy back in his heart, and in his body. Before long, his health had improved so much that he was able to go back to school again.

There he got to talk to his friends, and tell them all the strange things he had seen. While he was talking to his best friend he saw something sticking out of his friend’s school bag. The boy asked his friend what it was, and he was so insistent that finally his friend had to show him what was in the bag:

There, inside, were all the fancy-dress suits and disguises that his best friend had been using to try to cheer the little boy up!

And from that day on, the little boy always did his best to make sure that no one felt sad and alone.