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Do you like Eggs for breakfast? A boiled egg seems to just set me up for the morning! Have you ever noticed, one end of the egg is a bit more pointed than the other one? Which end do you think you should break if you are going to eat the egg? And does it really matter which end you choose?
A long time ago, a man called Jonathan Swift wrote a story about which end of the egg you should break. The book was called Gulliver's travels. It was about a man called Gulliver who travelled to a very strange country called Lilliput, where everyone was very, very small- no bigger than Ken and Barbie, although perhaps with less exciting proportions.
Like many short grown-ups, the people who lived in Lilliput loved to strut about in fine clothes. The king got in just as much of a tizzy as Barbie when he decided what to wear in the morning- should he put on his pink suit, or the orange one?
And did those people in Lilliput love to
argue
and fight! Their fathers had told them to break their eggs at the fat
end.
But when the king was a boy, he tried to smash an egg at the fat end,
and
he cut his finger. So when he was a grown-up, he made a law that anyone
who broke their egg at the fat end should
be put to death.
Everyone wanted to keep on breaking their eggs the way they had always done. So the country had six terrible wars to decide which end of the egg should be broken. Books about breaking eggs at the fat end were burned, anyone who read these books lost their jobs, and 11,000 people were put to death.
I think one thing the story was trying to show us is that the things we fight about are pretty silly, whether we fight with our brothers and sisters at home around the dinner table, or with kids at school who have different clothes, and perhaps a different religion from ours.
So next time you are tempted to get into a fight with someone, think about those little people in Lilliput and the way that they were fighting over how to eat an egg! And ask yourself- am I being just as silly as they were?
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