Grandma told me when she was a girl she only ate meat once a year at Christmas, when they killed a goat and roasted it for the whole village. The rest of the time they ate fish from the river like tilapia. I was happy when she told me that because I like fish even more than meat. But when I read about us fishing too many fish until there will be none left I was sad.

I wanted to celebrate vegetables. I brought a yam into school as an example of a vegetable. Big Ben had to go with my idea because he has difficulty reading and talking in class unless it’s maths or PPF. Anyway, he wasn’t at school yesterday because of Anger Management so I had to present on my own.

I got to geography last because I always try to avoid the rush between lessons. As soon as I walked through the door I heard, ‘Where’s your Leaper boyfriend?’ It was Pete LMS. He always says this when Big Ben isn’t at school. Some of the class laughed, but Jake smiled at me and Maria said:

‘Shut up! You’re not funny.’

I like Jake and Maria, they often stick up for me. Jake’s very good at PPF, even though he shouts out in class, and Maria does the high jump at athletics club. She’s so good she represented Brazil.

I sat down at the back of the class and refreshed my mobile for the speech. I knew it off by heart but liked reading it over and over again. It distracted me from the talking that goes on during lessons when the teacher is speaking. The class is extra noisy for Mr Carter who speaks extra loudly in a slow, croaky voice, even though the geography class is small, only 15 children.

Suddenly, it was my turn to present. I took the yam out of my bag and I could hear someone laughing but I didn’t know why. I stood up, scrolled down my mobile for the prompt list and took a deep breath like I was going to push out of the blocks for the 100 metres.

‘Toomanycowsintheworldeatpeople.’

The whole class laughed so loud I couldn’t rearrange my thoughts properly. That wasn’t what I wanted to say but we were advised to deliver from prompts rather than read the full speech from the page. Mr Carter said we could use our mobile phones and make a list of words so we knew what to focus on for each section. My list said:

COWS
DAIRY
FISH
VEGETABLES