James offers a reward

Tuesday
Mary Dunwich writes:

The boy's science project was due in today, so Charlie and Harry loaded their space-time travel module into the back of the our and drove it for them to Bouncing Bunnies Primary School. They also took in their written work (mostly designs for the modification of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, thought up by the ever-inventive mind of the late Professor Albert Einstein, whose spirit my son has been channelling all through this school term).

The boys are not in a happy mood since their key piece of evidence for time-travel, the dodo which they brought back from the seventeeth century, had it away on his little toes and was last seen in the spacious and historic grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford. They took the rather less convincing seventeenth century dead black rat (from the Great Fire of London, you could see the singe marks on his fur if you looked really hard), and some very wobbly footage of Granny Dunwich's sitting room from the nineteen sixties, taken using Jay's mobile phone.

Miss Bannock was not entirely impressed with the boys' efforts. She admired the aesthetics of the travel module (the Christmas fairy lights do really look very good on it), but as they couldn't get it to work she didn't really get the full-on time machine experience. Harry thinks the wireless LAN installed in the classrooms was emitting a damping standing wave field. I suspect that the panel of switches that got knocked off the contraption as they heaved it into the boot may have had some critical function. Either way, once in the classroom under the bemused gaze of Miss Bannock, it refused to budge so much as an inch (or a second). It was all very disappointing for Stanley, Jay and James. Miss Bannock liked the write-up however, and gave them a C+. That's not bad for a project that shows no sign of working, ever having worked, or ever becoming capable of working in the future. It's better than James got for his frog-stretching machine, and that even worked!

James came home in a bad mood and wrote out a reward notice for Dodgson. I sneaked a peak at it before he e-mailed it off to the psychology department at Magdalen College. It said:

"Missing: one Dodo! (Raphus cucullatus)

Height: one metre
Weight: 20 Kg (podgy)
Colour: light grey
Feet: Yellow
Beak: Long and curved
Tail: White and fluffy
Wearing: tartan dog-collar

Answers to the name of Dodgson. If you find him, please keep him warm, give him some pigeon food and a bowl of water and ring us on the number on the collar. Or you can contact the Psychology Department at Magdalen College because they know who we are.

He also likes Maltesers.

Reward for information leading to return: 10 Mars Bars, 3 Fruit Shoots, 32p, a champion conker and a plastic dog poo."