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and from the naturally formed armchair about halfway up you had a wonderful view over the whole garden; you could sit perfectly still, screened by a swathe of branches and small twigs, and nobody’d ever know you were there unless you dropped your chewing gum on their heads. It was even fairly comfortable, as trees go. Just no elves showed up, was all.
    I gave it a whole half-hour, which is a long time to sit dead still and pay attention to absolutely nothing whatsoever going on around you. By this time, I was beginning to wonder if I really did care so passionately about the elf question, or whether there might not be a slim chance that I could carry on and live a normal life, indoors and not freezing to death, without knowing the truth about small pointy-eared people. It was at this juncture that I discovered that both of my legs had done what I should’ve stayed doing when the alarm went off, and gone to sleep.
    Even our old apple tree wasn’t so amenable that you could get down out of it with two numb legs, so it quickly became obvious that I was going to be stuck there a little longer. By now I’d come to the conclusion that for whatever reason there weren’t any elves to be seen, and I might as well rest my eyes for a while by closing them.
    Bizarre thing, the process of falling asleep. It seemed to me that I stayed where I was, and so did the tree, but that the landscape underneath it changed: a bit like a revolving stage in a theatre. Under the tree there was – well, a garden, but a different garden; bigger, more open, scruffier. Lots more room between the flowers, if you see what I mean.
    The strangest thing about it was how normal it seemed; as if this was somewhere I’d been before, loads of times, no big deal at all. Certainly I wasn’t the least bit nervous when I hopped down out of the tree and strolled towards where the house would have been if there’d been an equivalent to our house in this scenario, which there wasn’t. Of course, I knew that, having been here so many times before . . .
    Then, quite suddenly, I was on my hands and knees in a very soft flower bed that smelled overpoweringly of freshly turned earth and vintage horseshit. I swore, got up again and looked round to see what had tripped me. It turned out to be a miniature cliff face in the soil, part of an inverted plateau, something like eight inches below the rest of the bed and compressed flat, as if by a heavy weight that had descended from overhead. It was a big plateau, though much more long than wide, with an outward curve on the right hand side and a corresponding inward curve on the left. In fact, but for the excessive size of it, you’d have sworn it was a giant footprint.
    Who left that there, then? I asked, under my breath and rhetorically. Bloody lunatics, why can’t they ever look where they’re putting their feet?
    It was, of course, a giant footprint. Furthermore, it was my giant footprint – not mine in the sense of I-sawit-first-so-get-lost. Mine in the sense of having been created by my left foot; which was ludicrous, of course, because for one thing my foot wasn’t that big, and for another it was attached to the end of my leg, and I knew perfectly well where it had been. Still, I looked round and sure enough, there it was; the manufacturer’s name, which was embossed into the sole of the trainers I was standing up in, but here standing proud of the dirt in mirror-written relief.
    Well now , I mused with disgust; maybe a trifle lacking in subtlety as regards the symbolism? Just to make sure I was interpreting it correctly, I felt the top of my right ear. Sure enough, there it was; a sharp upsweep to the curve, finishing in a distinct point. Still there , I told myself. So that’s all right.
    At that moment my eyes snapped open. I looked down. Below me was our garden – the small, crowded version – and just beyond that, the house. The reason