This pair of poems by Lord Alfred Tennyson sound like they are echoing through the underwater chambers of the ocean.

We have already quoted The Mermaid in our story Bertie and the Mermaid and we thought it was so nice, it would be a shame not to hear the rest of it.

The Merman.

1

Who would be
A merman bold,
Sitting alone,
Singing alone
Under the sea,
With a crown of gold,
On a throne?

2

I would be a merman bold;
I would sit and sing the whole of the day;
I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power;
But at night I would roam abroad and play
With the mermaids in and out of the rocks,
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower;
And holding them back by their flowing locks
I would kiss them often under the sea,
And kiss them again till they kiss’d me
Laughingly, laughingly;
And then we would wander away, away
To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,
Chasing each other merrily.

This is another slightly crazy chocolate story and is the companion to The Monkey Who Loved Chocolate. It continues our Zoo Stories series featuring Theo the Monkey - though you have to be patient and wait a bit for Theo to enter the stage.

Read by Natasha. Duration 19.20 minutes. Story by Bertie.

It was Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known as pancake day. The City Mayor was sitting up in bed eating his breakfast: - a big pile of pancakes with black caviar and sour cream, washed down with champaign. Black caviar, in case you don’t know, is an extremely rare and expensive food - with each spoon full you eat a thousand little beady black eggs of a mighty river fish called the Sturgeon. If you tried it, you might not even like it, but the City Mayor loved caviar as much as some people love chocolate. Indeed, he was quite content, apart from the fact that he would have to give something up for the 6 weeks known as Lent which come after pancake day and run up until Easter. He pondered this, and decided to give up beetroot, because he never liked it anyway. As he took another silver-spoonful of caviar, his mobile phone rang. How he hated it when people called him while he was still at breakfast ! He was about to throw his phone out of the window when he noticed that the call was coming from the Chief Of Police.

“Oh dear,” thought the Mayor. “He probably wants to miss our card game. He always claims he’s busy fighting crime, but I know he just doesn’t like losing.”

This is the third part of our story about girl called Gladys and her three older sisters who are in a girl-band called the chiX. If you heard Part One and Part Two you’ll know that Gladys isn’t in the band because she’s too young, but actually she’s the brainy sister, and she writes the songs.

In this episode, Gladys has some a important things to say - but nobody is listening - and she starts to wonder if she might as well be a ghost-girl.

Read by Natasha. Duration 16.14. By Bertie.

It was Saturday afternoon, and Gladys’s three older sisters were just finishing their breakfast.

“What shall we do for the rest of the day?” asked Sam in a half-asleep voice.

“You mean what’s left of it,” said Gladys who had been up for hours, but her sisters didn’t seem to hear her.