Bonjour! It’s Nancy here – from the soon-to-be world famous pop group Nancy and the Meerkats!
After our first record “Put Your Paws Up” became a massive hit, we’re off on a huge tour of the UK!
We haven’t quite made it to stadium status yet – some of the venues are more Weeny than Wembley – but I’m going to be letting you know what’s been going on each day in my journal for Fun Kids!
We’re on to the final leg of the tour now and poo Big Joe is having to drive through the foggy night again so we can make it in time for the next date!
I think he’ll be glad when the tour is over to be honest – he’s always unhappy at the number of pup cake packets all over the floor!
He’s taught me and the girls loads of stuff though while we’ve been on the road, like tonight he was telling us all about cat’s eyes! But it wasn’t anything to do with that flea-bitten old feline Kitty Perry – these were cat’s eyes on the road
They’re not actual cat’s eyes but the little lights on the road that you can only see at night!
There’s quite a story in why they’ve got such a funny name!
You see Big Joe was telling us that the inventor was a Yorkshireman called Percy Shaw who came up with the idea over 80 years ago!
He liked to claim that inspiration struck when he was driving home from the pub on a foggy night – a bit like this one!
Apparently he saw the reflection of his headlights in the eyes of a cat, sitting by the road and that gave him the idea of putting tiny pairs of glass reflective lenses into a rubber cases and setting the cases along the roads!
It looks like they’ve got light bulbs in them but it’s actually that the glass lenses just reflect back the car headlights – like a mirror!
And it doesn’t matter if you’re driving over them because they’re super tough and when they get squished down a built-in rubber wiper actually cleans the glass eyes – helping them to shine on into the night!
How cool is it that they’re self-cleaning? That is like so handy! Imagine if the tour bus was self-cleaning, then we wouldn’t have to put our pup cake wrappers in the bin at all!
Listen to this episode of Nancy and the Meerkats below…
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