The following is an excerpt from Volume 2 of the Falcon Boy: A Fairly Hopeless Hero series, The Brothers Revoltable Travelling Circus and Other Crazy Fun with Special Guests (coming soon in paperback)

In each episode of A Very Testing Time Peg and Dee Quilty test things to the great delight of an online audience that now numbers in the billions. Each episode (and there are 1000s of them) begins the same way:

‘I wonder what happens if … ?’ says Peg.

‘Let’s find out!’ replies Dee.

Cue wonky glockenspiel and Peg and Dee materialize. Each episode is meant to be great fun for all involved but that does depend upon your viewpoint. For children like Ellis and her classmates, Peg and Dee can do no wrong. For the many concerned parents and anyone else sent into an absolute rage by the runaway success of the simplest of ideas, ‘A Very Testing Time’ is exactly that. Episodes that caused considerable concern for those considerably concerned included;

spray-painting an elephant’s rear;

dressing cats in dolls clothes;

passing off pigs as babies in prams;

putting their parents into residential care;

starting a run on the Stock Exchange;

convincing an elderly relative that Christmas Day had been moved to a week in August;

starting up a start-up to close down their least favourite Burger chain;

lobbying their local elected representative for lost distance wrestling to be made an Olympic sport;

inventing a board game with no board and no rules;

entering a potty into an art exhibition;

using a random word generator to write an award-winning novel;

breaking into a top security prison;

entering and eventually getting a bronze medal for coming third in a mini-marathon without either of them leaving their bedroom-cum-studio;

advising a monarch to let the spare rooms in his palace be used as public storage facilities;

patenting a brand-new rip chord made especially for deep sea parachuting;

sponsoring a graduate through Law School with the express purpose of getting this graduate to sue themselves in court (the graduate subsequently lost but took the case to Appeal);

electronically influencing purchasing patterns for a range of television shopping channels;

starting (and ending) a new aesthetic movement;

using a 3-D printer to print a 2-D printer;

hiring a flash mob to comment upon the actual absurdity of the everyday as a philosophical concept;

commissioning a series of experimental short films based on the notion of liminality.