The first really important building to come down because the line of dinosaur bones went under it was Langham Towers. Once it was the headquarters of Sunderland University.

Down it came in a shower of dust and splinters, and the bones were dug out.

For a while now there’d been too many for Dyspepsia to keep in her bedroom, and they were piled up in the lounge and the backyard. Daddy was beginning to look unhappy. Since the bones were so precious, they really needed a special place to keep them, somewhere dry, with people watching over them the whole time.

There were some empty warehouses at Pallion, so Dyspepsia rented the biggest one, and the ten-wheeled lorries took all the bones round there.

Then the bone trench got to Burnhope Road, and Spookie and Dyspepsia had to scratch their heads very hard, because the next important building in the way was the Civic Centre. But the council officers seemed pleased about it. They put their pencils in their briefcases and moved out into separate offices all over town.

Spookie and Dyspepsia hadn’t expected the council to be so good about it. But if there’s one thing that councils like doing, it’s building themselves bigger and better offices.

The Civic Centre was all very fine when it was built, but that was years ago. It was starting to look a bit scruffy and old-fashioned.

When you become a City, you can build an even bigger and better block of offices for your headquarters, and the council was looking forward to doing that. And when you become the capital city of a whole new country, like Edinburgh has in the past few years, the headquarters you can build are super-duper.

But Sunderland was still only a city, so they had to keep their ideas within bounds.

They said they’d build themselves another Civic Centre in a different place, but only when the dinosaur was all dug up and no more buildings had to come down. Wouldn’t it be silly to build another Civic Centre much too soon and have the dinosaur go through it again!

People were trying to kid Dyspepsia into spending some of her billion pounds on building herself a fine new headquarters. But Dyspepsia thought that a waste of money. What was wrong with her bedroom still?

Mummy and daddy were being very good about all the people coming to the front door to see her. All it needed was four more telephone lines installed, so people could phone up instead.

…to be continued.