BEN DRAKE SKYE BLAKE AND THE SCRUNCH SNAKE

I stink at art! I stink worse than a fish stall that’s been pelted with rotten eggs. Paint and clay won’t do what I want them to. They just end up in my hair and all over my hands and shirt. Ask me to draw you an animal and it’ll look like my three-year-old sister did it. No wonder I was hating every second of our art lesson.

MY NAME’S BEN DRAKE BUT HE CALLS ME SCRUNCHER BECAUSE I’M ALWAYS SCRUNCHING UP MY PIECES OF PAPER AND STARTING AGAIN

Some of the other kids were creating amazing pictures with no effort. Not me. I was trying to draw a snake, but I’d spilled brown paint on it, so now I was trying to turn it into some sort of porcupine. Our art teacher MrWest was strolling around the room. He’s disliked me since the lesson when we had to draw him, and I made him look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. (To be fair to me, he does look a bit like Gollum.)

‘Let’s see what Scruncher’s done, then,’ he said. My name’s Ben Drake but he calls me Scruncher because I’m