Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea

“Hoo-Mins are so weird!” said George. “What are they all doing? They don’t seem to be hunting, or eating, or tunnelling – and what else is there? I can’t make it out at all.”

“Oh, I know!” said Josie. “It’s do-diddle. They do-diddle all the time, I’ve watched them.”

“What’s do-diddle?”

“It means rushing about doing things that don’t make sense – that we’d never bother about. I don’t know if it’s to do with their food or their nests or what. It’s just – do-diddle.”

They looked at her, puzzled and curious.

“Do you watch Hoo-Mins a lot, then?”

Josie looked rather uncomfortable. “Well, er – yes. I do watch them. From time to time. But I don’t understand any of it really.”

“Tell us more,” said Harry.

“Well,” Josie said. “This straight-up-hard-thing, for instance. I watched them do-diddle that. It wasn’t like this to begin with. It was just flat pieces of a tree. After they’d do-diddled it, it was like it is now, a different shape, big enough to hold all these yellow-curves and move them about.”

George and Harry looked at each other. She wasn’t just a pretty poison-claw. She was clever.

“So what are they do-diddling now?” asked George.

They watched crackle-lessly for a while. Then Josie shrugged (a centipedish shrug of course, by hunching her front two segments).

“They’re just moving things about,” she said. “They do that a lot. They’ve probably got some kind of plan, but I don’t know what.”

None of them did, but you can, because I’ll tell you.

Their crate had been brought to a big covered market. All the bustling and do-diddling was the Hoo-Mins preparing to sell the produce inside them.