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said. ‘And if your IQ was greater than your inside leg measurement, you’d know that. I’m so glad I’m not as stupid as you are – it must be so infinitely depressing.’
    â€˜Oh well, then,’ I said. ‘See you around.’
    She frowned. ‘In the distance, preferably. Now, would you mind going and contaminating somewhere else? After all, what harm has this tennis court ever done you?’
    I’m not totally insensitive; I can take a hint. So, with a glum sort of smile and a slight shoulder-shrug to convey bewildered regret, I pushed off and left her to her target practice.
    It was easy enough to come to terms with the idea that my girlfriend – my only friend, if we’re going to be grittily honest about it – had decided she never wanted to see me ever again in this or any parallel universe. After all, I’d never really been able to get my head around the idea that she’d ever liked me, let alone – well, there you go. There was a certain feeling of dreary inevitability about the while thing that made it easier to accept, though no less hard to bear. At least it removed a complication from my life; and one less thing to lose is one less thing to have to worry about.
    (Did I ever mention that when I was nine my school nickname was Eeyore? Even the teachers called me that sometimes, when they weren’t thinking.)
    If there was a positive side to this development, it was that I could now give my full time and attention to the matter of elves. The drawback to that was that, in all honesty, I no longer cared. After all, what the hell was the point of gathering evidence for the existence of small, pointy-eared people? I already believed, and I’d long since reached the conclusion that I’d never be able to convince anybody else, not if I dragged out a live, kicking example and shoved it up their nose. What good would it do, in any event? The human race had managed to shuffle along quite happily for centuries not believing in elves. Finding out the truth would probably just get them mad at me.
    Still, I’d come this far – which is just a sort-of-upbeat way of saying force of habit, but there are worse reasons for doing things. The first step, it occurred to me, was to make a start on some actual tangible written notes. Quite by chance, one of my Christmas presents had been a diary. To be precise, a give-away freebie promotional diary, the kind that businesses have done up with their name in gilt on the spine, so that every time you go to write down an appointment or whatever, you catch sight of the name and are reminded of their extreme generosity and general overall excellence. In case you think I’m just being paranoid, by the way, how else would you explain the fact that this particular diary, which came from my uncle Trevor the probate lawyer, was richly gold-embossed with the legend T. J. Bardshaw & Sons Family Funeral Directors est. 1958 ?
    Not that that mattered a damn, since I wasn’t even figuring on using it as a diary, just a useful notebook to write stuff down in. Besides, it wasn’t as if anybody was ever likely to read it except me, so what difference did it make?
    So: all I needed now was a quiet place to work and some privacy. Unfortunately, both commodities tend to be rare verging on non-existent in the context of boarding-school life. Short of locking myself in the lavatory, I couldn’t rely on an undisturbed hour from wake-up bell to lights out. It’s also an awkward fact of human nature that if you look like you’re doing something you don’t want other people to see, you broadcast some sort of psychic wave that attracts all the busybodies and amateur comedians within a two-mile radius. If you want to be left alone to get on with something, your best bet is to sit in the open in the busiest part of the premises; and if you keep stopping people and asking them for help with some aspect of what