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profoundly grateful to have seen the back of what-are-you-doing-in-my-study, and it’s hard to work up a fine lather of righteous fury when what you really want to do is breathe a long sigh of relief and bust out grinning. ‘Why must you assume—’
    He laughed. If offensive laughter was a martial art, he’d have been the little wizened Grand Master with the bottle glasses who can beat up all the heavies without breaking into a sweat. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Now get your useless arse out of my study. Your mother’ll be wondering where you’ve got to.’
    So that was that; I’d escaped, but I hadn’t found anybody to share the burden with, or to absolve me of it, so it looked like I was stuck with it. I spent the rest of the day hiding in the lee of the Christmas tree (we always had something that looked like an undercover giant redwood. Conspicuous consumption? Us? Nah . . .) with a box of someone else’s Ferrero Rochers and a notebook, trying to figure out a properly scientific approach to the next phase of my research – it was research already, you’ll have noticed. Well, when you’re that age and for the first time in your life you happen to trip over something that actually engages your attention, there’s a slight tendency to obsess.
    Boxing Day was good, because the entire household could be relied on not to stir out of their pits until the nausea died away and the light stopped hurting their eyes, which gave me till noon at the very least, probably longer. I’d set my alarm for 7 a.m. – before you start revising your opinion of me I’d just like to point out that I’m not normally a morning person, but extreme circumstances justify extreme measures – and it turned out to be one of those bright, cold, brittle late-December days when it’s deceptively easy to forget what a screw-up your life is, because everything looks so calm and relaxed and meant , if you see what I mean. I made myself a coffee, mummified myself in long scarves under a thick coat and let myself out into the garden.
    I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how all the Attenboroughs and the nature-documentary people hack it, unless the whole thing’s a set-up and they’re using stop-animation and stuffed animals. Ten minutes huddled motionless in a bush and I’d already checked my watch twenty-seven times, on several occasions shaking it vehemently to see if it’d stopped. Not a trace of any elves, of course. I drew the logical conclusion – that I was simply in the wrong place and that just the other side of the loganberry entanglements was a seething mass of elves – crawled out, stretched my apparently permanently mutilated spine and relocated. Ten minutes later, though, the new spot was just as elf-free. The only conclusion to be drawn was that my fieldcraft was at fault: I was making too much noise, or they could see me, or I was either upwind or downwind or at-right-angles-wind of them and they were scuttling back into their lairs with hankies pressed over their noses muttering, ‘Coo, what a pong!’ in Elvish.
    I thought hard, trying to remember something I’d heard or read years ago about some bloke who hunted tigers by sitting up in a tree; tigers don’t tend to look up much, apparently, so they don’t see you so easily if you’re twelve feet off the ground. There was, of course, absolutely no logical reason why a tactic that held good against huge stripy psychotic moggies should work with elves; I guess it was just one of those intuitive things, a sudden reprise of a million-year-old predatory instinct, linking me for one brief telepathic moment with my hunter-gatherer ancestors.
    Didn’t bloody work, though. Oh, the tree was no problem; there was a whacking great apple tree with thoughtfully arranged branches that even a sworn acrophobe like me could get into without screaming,