PRETTY KATE AND HER MAGIC EGG

Kylie Minogue is to make her debut as an author in September with Showgirl Princess, a semi-autobiographical children’s book. What might happen if Kate Moss, who allegedly used a Faberge egg to carry cocaine, ecstasy and the date-rape drug Rohypnol around the world with her, followed the same route?

Our latest bestseller, for streetwise kids
which we won the rights to after furious bids

is a fabulous publishing powder keg
called Pretty Kate and her Magic Egg

in which a young woman travels the world
and copes with the chaos into which she’s been hurled

by extracting white powder from an egg she’s called Charlie,
with which she escapes from situations gone gnarly.

It’s a thrilling adventure for kids of all ages
and is blessed with a plethora of thick, shiny pages

plus a bag of magic powder free with each book.
We’ll sell Pretty Kate by hook or by crook!

We commissioned illustrations from Damien Hirst
but I fear we overestimated the public’s thirst

for pictures of girls preserved and dissected
with their nasal septums worn and infected,

so we’ve gone more traditional, with Quentin Blake,
as he’s good at drawing women as thin as a rake

and he makes his subjects seem all warm and fuzzy
even if their lives are distressingly scuzzy.

We sent a free copy to Nelson Mandela
to keep in his bathroom, but the august old fella

never wrote back to say what he thought,
though Will Self seems to think that the prose style is taut.

It’s hip, it’s exciting; the kid’s book of the moment
guaranteed to cause the press to foment

about amoral models, drug abuse and greed,
but we don’t care as long as it gets kids to read.