"Oh Horace! Won't you ever learn?" The irate teacher glared at the hapless student. "That's the third time today you have dropped the baby. One more time and I'll have to kick you off the course."

Horace shrunk back into a defensive posture. He couldn't lose his place on the course. Life would be hell for him without the chance of this job. The only job a self-respecting stork could ever get.

For as long as his family had been in Africa they had been part of the baby delivery service, and he wasn't about to be the first to bring dishonour on the family name if he could help it.

He sat disconsolately; trying to work out where he was going wrong. He watched the activity going on around him, and took in the sounds and smells. The college chef was preparing their lunch and the air was thick with the odour of fish. The rest of his class were still practising their skills.

"Pick it up and try again." His teacher's patience with him was being tried, but Horace was his cousin. He couldn't be the one to fail him, not a family member.

Horace stooped down to the little bundle at his feet. Gently he adjusted the sling around the doll that he was practicing his art with.

Obeying James, his cousin, he waddled then broke into an ungainly trot and eventually became airborne.

This time he sailed gracefully around the course, and carefully dropped the pretend baby down the target chimney pot.

The rest of the group of students cheered, they were rooting for him, Horace was an amusing stork, keeping them in stitches with his constant stream of jokes. He was also a prankster, and was often in trouble with the adults.

Over the following days they all honed their skills and soon it was time for them to be tested by the Head stork, an old lady of terrifying visage, but with a heart of gold. They would have to be good to pass, but she wouldn't penalise them unnecessarily.

Horace and all of his friends passed with flying colours. His baby-dropping episodes were in the past. Finally they were ready for the real world.

At first Horace was brilliant, every baby reaching its respective destination on time and in good condition, but after a few weeks things started to go wrong.

He delivered a baby to the wrong house, an easy mistake considering the ramshackle dwellings that the humans lived in. The corrugated iron shacks all looked alike, but the drop was made to a grumpy old couple who yelled at him when he left the unwanted bundle. He was able to rectify his mistake that time without being found out by his overseers. But then it happened again, and again, and again. Not one after the other but sufficiently frequently to earn him a stern telling-off.

Eventually he was taken off the delivery of human babies, and put on the more mundane task of delivering the babies to animals. Even this he started to screw up. Gorillas started to be reared by chimpanzees, and he even left the baby of a lion with a wild boar mother. Even worse was to follow, sparrows began to rear the offspring of eagles, and baby rats grew up as children of mice.

Protests poured in, the irate parents couldn't understand why their offspring differed so much from themselves, and instead of it creating harmony amongst the different species, it caused all sorts of trouble. The head of the stork delivery service had a massive job sorting out all of Horace's mistakes.

The end result was that he was drafted to England where there was a desperate shortage of delivery storks.

Horace didn't like the cold weather, and he didn't settle in at all well. He missed the smell of Africa, from the exotic cooking of the humans' food to the dank warm perfumes of the jungles that were stirred up by him as he carried out his deliveries.

None of the local storks wanted to know him, but he tried to do his job. At least the houses were all different from each other, so he didn't have that problem.

The storks were so busy that he never got a day off, and soon mistakes began to creep in again. Parents began to notice that their child's appearance didn't always match that of their brothers and sisters. Some were much darker, some appeared very oriental in looks, and others with definite Afro Caribbean features. Of course the opposite was true as well. Caucasian children were given to Asian families, Chinese families and Afro Caribbean families. None of them were at all pleased, and Horace was finally retired to Whipsnade Zoo to keep him out of harms way.

The children were never really sorted out properly, and that is how England became such a cosmopolitan society.