About I don’t want that in my ice cream:
Sophie, ten (but she might be eight and a half or nine and three-quarters) puts on her mummy’s shoes and clip-clops into disaster and guilt. When her ‘best-est’ friend Jessica is on holiday, Sophie is so desperate for someone to play with that she ends up at the home of the weirdest girl in her school, who has a morbid interest in funerals… for soft toys.
As for their invented language, not only do Sophie and her ‘best-est’ friend understand it, but so do sinister beings from elsewhere in the universe.
After a hard day at school, she is horrified to be lectured at by complete strangers on subjects ranging from cinema to doggie poo. She finds herself swimming in a cup of weak tea with a toad, travelling back in time to WWII, and featuring in a bizarre documentary.
Step into the Kafkaesque and weird world of Sophie, her cantankerous mother and her doting daddy.
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Author Bio:
George Fratton (real name Simon Willis) is a translator with a command of Arabic, French, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. He holds a BA in Arabic studies and has spent most of his working life in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, plus three months as translator/interpreter in New York City.
He taught Arabic at the universities of Portsmouth and Southampton in England and conducted courses in translation (Arabic/English) for media use at Misr International University, plus workshops for journalists at the Al-Ahram Regional (al-Iqlimi) Institute.
During his 23 years’ full-time teaching, he took eight years off to work with The Egyptian Gazette as copy editor and later columnist. He never really ‘left’ The Gazette and he is back with the newspaper full-time. He also contributed articles to RetailME and in 2006 published a collection of essays and short stories under the title Let’s Swap Legs (2006) and I Don’t Want That In My Ice Cream (2021). He still writes a column Interesting Times for the said newspaper.
He has guided seminars and guided workshops in such skills as delivering presentations, writing business reports, negotiating and improving work performance for Nestle, Halliburton, ABN Amro Bank and Heinz.
To sum up, Simon Willis can show you where to use the right words in the correct order. And he can inform, educate and entertain — not necessarily in that order and sometimes in execrable taste.