My Little Pony

The problem of course was that her survival instinct seemed adept at taking her from one bad situation into the bone-scattered den of another. She would have to sit down with it one day, get it drunk, and impress upon it that checking whether things were dangerous before jumping into them was also a perfectly valid way of ensuring survival.

But for now, it carried her onward and deeper into the forest.

‘I’d stop if I was you,’ said a bush with a cockney accent.

She stopped suddenly. This involved an enormously complicated set of movements that would have taken an acrobatic instructor 15 years to learn, but which she achieved by simply stubbing her foot on a tree root in surprise.

‘Bet that hurt,’ said the bush at the conclusion of the show.

‘You think,’ asked a pile of leaves with Daisy’s legs sticking out of them.

She spat dirt and leaves from her mouth, worked out which way the ground was supposed to be in, and put her feet there.

A few moments of joint-popping contortionism later, she was standing again and facing a grinning man.

The smile was blinding and he looked like a first-year costuming student’s representation of Robin Hood, complete with neatly trimmed goatee, layers of green fabric that queued up for the much coveted award of “best and greenest”, and a twinkling in his eye that made him look like he was winking madly.

‘Dear maiden!’ he boomed.

‘Shhh,’ she hushed him. ‘There’s a bloody giant around.’

‘It matters not! I will vanquish them with my bow,’ he held this up, ‘and with my arrow!’ he pulled a sliver of wood from a quiver on his back. They looked like toys.

‘You won’t have a prayer against that much fat.’

‘I would prevail! Have you not heard of the trials of Rogers and Hammerstein?!’

There was a pause while someone in the near-distance shone a spotlight against his teeth.

‘What?’ she frowned in confusion. ‘You’re going to attack him with a pair of musical composers?’

It was an idea with some merit, she supposed, and was probably the best use for those with a wont to put silly words to music.

‘No. Not Rogers and Hammerstein,’ he looked down in worry, his bravado having encountered the equivalent of a twenty car pile-up on an Autobahn. ‘It wasn’t them at all, was it?’

Daisy looked on with an attentive expression, while trying to work out which was the quickest exit route from this particular lunatics sphere of stupidity.

‘Similes always got me at Hood school,’ he continued. Some of the cars burst into flames. ‘George and the Dragon?

No…’