The Donut Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page A

me.
    ‘Sure,’ I said, and shrugged.
    DONUT COUNT:

    Last day, so had to fortify myself for what was to come.

Monday 2 April
    1 p.m.
    IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a two-hour drive to Camp Fatso. The plan was to set off at 7 a.m. to get there for the 9 a.m. start. My mum was taking me because my dad’s lost his licence. I don’t mean that the police took it away from him or anything, just that he put it down somewhere and now can’t find it.
    Things went wrong from the beginning. First my alarm clock didn’t quack (it’s shaped like a duck and I’ve been meaning to destroy it for years now) and then the car wouldn’t start, so we had to call the AA man, who turned out to be the AA lady, and it took her half an hour to sort out the problem. And then we got really badly lost because I was in charge of directions and I got confused about the difference between Sussex and Suffolk when I put the address into the sat-nav.
    It all meant that we were hours and hours late.
    When our sat-nav told us that we were about five miles from Camp Fatso, we drove through a small village with nothing much in it except a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb and a closed-down petrol station and a shop that sold doormats.
    After the village, the road twisted and turned like a snake having a fight with another snake, and it took a further fifteen minutes to get to Camp Fatso. The countryside gradually changed from fields with cows in (one of which was having a giant green wee) to woodland. It should have been pretty in a countrysidey sort of way. But the trees were too close together for my liking, so it all seemed sort of gloomy and depressing and a little bit threatening.
    ‘This is lovely,’ said Mum. ‘It’s a bit like a fairy-tale forest.’
    Did I really need to explain to her what happens in fairy tales? That kids get abandoned by their evil parents? That they get eaten by wolves? Imprisoned and tortured by witches? Forced to do silly dances while wearing those shoes with curly-wurly toes?
    I didn’t ever want to have to wear those shoes.
    But I knew that she was only saying it because she needed to believe that she was taking me somewhere nice. 1
    My first sighting of Camp Fatso was a tall wooden tower that loomed over the trees. A flag was flying from the top of the tower. The flag had a picture of a rosy-cheeked kid, grinning like an idiot who’d finally got a joke two days after he’d heard it. Then there was a sign at the side of the road saying CAMP FATSO , and we turned off. We bumped along a track for a few more minutes until we came to a wooden gateway. Above the gateway there was a banner that read:
    CAMP FATSO: GET FIT HAVING FUN!
    There was a man at the gate wearing a black tracksuit and carrying a clipboard. There was something weird on his head, like a sort of Cornish pasty made of hair. I’d say it was a wig, except that no one, surely, would knowingly wear a wig that looked so much like a wig? It might as well have had a giant arrow above it, inscribed with the words THIS IS A WIG .

    He looked at his watch and said, ‘Just arrived?’
    I wanted very much to say, ‘Duh!’ but I didn’t. We’ve all decided at school that saying, ‘Duh!’ when someone says something stupid is itself stupid, and the kind of thing you would say, ‘Duh!’ about, if saying, ‘Duh!’ hadn’t just been banned.
    ‘Sorry, traffic,’ said my mum.
    ‘Name, please.’
    ‘Dermot Milligan,’ she said. She obviously thought I’d get it wrong if I answered myself, and I’d say Dilbert Minigun or Dr Sebastian Banana or whatever.
    The black-tracksuited, bad-wigged man looked at his clipboard.
    ‘Ah, yes. Excellent. Out you get, young man.’
    ‘Can’t I drive him in?’ asked my mum, looking a bit worried.
    ‘Sorry, ’fraid not. No cars. And you’ll have to say your goodbyes here. We’ve found it just makes things more difficult for the young people if their parents or carers hang around. I’ll take Dermot up to reception.’
    I