Cosima is a young girl living in Timbuktu who ‘ever since she could remember wanted a camel of her own’. So Cosima saves up five and a half pence and buys Amazing Maisie from Abdul Hamid’s Camel Parlour. Amazing Maisie is a Marmalade Camel with ‘curling lips and twirling hips and a sumptuously comfortable hump like a cushion’, but she also talks and can only kneel if you talk to her about cold porridge. Cosima and Amazing Maisie have lots of adventures in the desert and one day they decide to enter the Christmas Camel Race to find the fastest camel in the desert, hoping to beat the cheating Wicked Wallah Wellibut.

I think I got this book for Christmas when I was about 11. I’m sure I couldn’t put it down until I had read it all. The idea of a camel that felt queasy and weak at the knees at the sight or mention of porridge made me laugh and laugh.

‘Oh you should really feel uneasy,
For it’s certainly gone cheesy
And there’s nothing quite so greasy,
So slippery and queasy,
As porridge that’s gone definitely, desperately cold’