When your Storyteller was a little one, I used to love books with people hiding in them. I would search through drawings covering the pages, looking for Wally, or Waldo, or Goldbug. 👀 I thought they were the coolest books. But what I didn’t know was that even five hundred years ago, people called scribes were hiding tiny drawings in books. And sometimes, those tiny drawings were bums.
Y’know what goes well with bums? Farts. They come from your bum. They have a smell and a sound. Can you make a fart sound? What kind of sound is it? Is it like music? Scribes certainly thought it did. They thought a fart sounded like a trumpet! How do we know they thought that? Because of their tiny drawings.
Long ago, all the books were written by hand. Scribes dipped bird feathers called quills (no, really!) into ink, and then put that ink on paper to tell their stories. It took a very long time: about one year for a single book! Can you imagine spending all day, every day, for a whole year, writing with a pencil? Wouldn’t you get a little bored? When your Storyteller was at school and got bored, I drew little doodles on the edges of my notebooks. And do you know what? So did those scribes. They drew animals, and curly plants, and bum trumpets. Wait, what‽ Did that say…bum trumpets?
Yup. They were everywhere. A scribe drew this unhappy fellow in an old songbook:
(although the person in the blue sweater looks even less happy: maybe they know what’s coming)
Did you know that animals fart, too? Scribes knew: they drew tiny pictures of animal bum trumpets, too. Just look at this silly rider and his magical, musical horse!
When my children play, I call them “my cheeky monkeys.”Here are two more cheeky monkeys, playing their bum trumpets in a book that’s seven hundred years old!
Do you think this trumpeter is happy because they have two trumpets?
Do you think their trumpets make the same sound? Would you like to have a listen? Would it sound like music, or like something else?
When I tell stories, I like to save the best part for last.
You know from all my stories that I think bums are funny. And you know from the fourth tale that I love birds. And you know from today’s story that I love trumpets. So to thank you for reading to the very end of today’s story, I will give you my all-time favourite picture.
Can you guess why it’s my favourite?