“Looking after pets” often crops up on the syllabus at school, and both Hammersmith and Dagenham were subjected to being the focus object of several circle times back in Shillingstone, but this year without a hamster to my name and not wanting to  pluck one of the goldfish out of the tank to take in for show and tell, I instead introduced Project Egg.

This is where each student and staff member is given a hard boiled egg to look after for the duration of a week, and at the end of the week anyone who has looked after their charge eggceptionally well gets to swap it for the hugely imaginative prize of an Easter Egg.

We all named and decorated our eggs, and the fun began. We took our eggs for walks, created thrones for them to sit in and made them chariots out of Lego. It wasn’t long before cracks started to appear, but at the end of the week, we had two survivors.

Meet Eggmerela:

With no cracks or blemishes, she smelt far more fragrant than any of her friends, and so with the Easter holidays looming, I decided to take her on an eggventure – and it just so happened I was about to go skiing and had a little bit of space left in the pocket of my ski jacket.

Our first adventures happened before we even left Devon, with Eggmerelda’s first and last experience of a Drive-Thru McDonalds:

Then on to Leigh Delamare Service station, where Eggmerelda was anxious that nobody slip on the freshly mopped floor (she’d seen enough of her friends break during her week at school)

We had a whole three hours to sleep at the Gatwick hotel before the alarm went off for our eggstremely early flight. Eggmerelda was very cosy in the wardrobe:

At the airport Eggmerelda loved travelling on the conveyor belt to get through security, and we had breakfast together on the other side. I didn’t order the full English – I thought it might cause a bit of controversy if one of Eggmerelda’s friends turned up fried on the plate:

We loved having a window seat on the plane:

And enjoyed a walk around Cervinia when we arrived:

Eggmerelda made a new friend who was almost as talkative as she is:

She was scared of visiting the crepe place incase she ended up as an ingredient:

And she definitely didn’t want to have a game of pool:

She enjoyed making some new friends at breakfast time:

And we borrowed this special throne so that she had a proper seat:

It seems not a lot of eggs get taken for walks in Cervinia, so Eggmerelda stopped traffic wherever she went:

And often got a cold bottom:

Eggmerelda was shocked to see an old friend at the dinner table on Thursday:

And raced to the supermarket to warn her friends about the perils of life:

But she couldn’t speak Italian so they didn’t understand.

Then it was time to go skiing. We waited a few days because Eggmerelda was a bit scared of tackling such an eggstreme sport.

It started off so well. We wrapped Eggmerelda in a serviette and then placed her inside a glove for extra protection, and she sat quite happily in my rucksack as we skied from Italy to Switzerland and back again:

But then it happened, the eggsact thing we were trying to avoid. Packed into a cable car with 99 other people, and all their skis and snowboards, there’s not much room to move. As the cable car juddered past a pylon, my rucksack smacked against a snowboard and an ominous smell filled the air. It could only mean one thing.

Back in the classroom we’d had sellotape to put Humpty Dumpty, Mario and Egg Sheeran back together again, but here on the mountain I had no First Aid at my fingertips. There was nothing I could do for Eggmerelda.

It was Game Ova.