Pompom the Nosey Giraffe

 In Chipper Jungle, everything was peaceful and happy until Pompom turned up. Pompom was an extremely tall giraffe, with a long bendy neck like some rubber plant. She got on everyone's nerves because she was just the nosiest and most gossipy animal anyone had ever known. What made it worse was that, thanks to her height and her long, bendy neck, there was no den or nest beyond her reach. There she'd be, always sticking her head in.

She observed everything, and made sure everyone knew what was going on. This annoyed so many animals that they had a meeting and decided to teach her a lesson.

At that time Big Bongo, the most important of all the monkeys, decided to move to an old abandoned den, and he did the place up until it was the cosiest home in the whole jungle. Pompom couldn't help her curiosity, and one night she tiptoed over there and approached the bedroom window. The window was open and she stuck her head inside. She was just on time to see Big Bongo leaving the bedroom. So, Pompom pushed her neck further in so that she could follow him to the next room. It was dark inside and she couldn't see very well, but she followed him down a corridor, and then into another bedroom, and then another...

Until at last Pompom couldn't follow him any more. She had run out of neck. Big Bongo had ran all around his house, and now Pompom's neck was in one enormous tangle.

Then all the other animals, who were in on the trick, came over to the house to let Pompom know what they thought of her irritating nosiness. She felt so embarrassed that she decided from then on that she would use her long neck for more constructive tasks than poking into the lives of others.

Curiosity about other people’s business shows a lack of respect. We all have a right to privacy.

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.

Changes are not a bad thing, it is up to ourselves to open the eyes and make something positive of them