My writing tends to lean towards blasphemy, profanity, gore, and other things probably not entirely suitable for a 5-to-8-year-old audience. So when a Twitter mutual asked me if I could write something for him to read out on his YouTube channel aimed at that age range, I was somewhat dubious. But I gave it a shot.

I ended up going with a poem, vaguely inspired by Lord Byron's The Destruction of Sennacherib (mine matches his in metre, rhyme scheme, and length, though probably not quality -- on account of him being Lord-fucking-Byron).

----
The Mad Science School

Bernadette sat and sighed in her chemistry class,
As the teacher was droning and mixing a glass
Of a boring red substance that fizzled and fell;
Bernadette wasn't keen, so she mixed bits as well,
In a beaker which burst and exploded in goo,
And that splattered the room and her teacher's face too.

The headmaster expelled Bernadette from his school,
And her mother was angry and called her a fool
Till a letter appeared on the day after that,
And it glowed bright and green with the post on the mat;
Bernadette tore it open and laughed, "I'm a fool?
I've been offered a place at The Mad Science School!"

At The Mad Science School, Bernadette and new mates
Did experiments, cackled, and pondered the fates
Of the folk who'd expelled them and mocked the girls' dreams;
In their classes and lunch hours they plotted their schemes,
And their chemicals bubbled and lightning coils flashed,
And their robot dogs growled and dinosaurs gnashed.

Bernadette's old headmaster was sat in his room,
When he looked out the window, the gates went kaboom!
Alligators with lasers devoured the gym,
And a purple-blue goo washed his teachers and him
Out among the debris that remained of his rule,
Where they cursed Bernadette and The Mad Science School.
----

You can watch David Woods read it out on The Story Shed.

I grew up watching things like Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All on Children's BBC. That program was one of the reasons I later went into classics. So, this type of storytelling has a lot of nostalgic appeal, and I hope Dave enjoys every success with it.