It doesn’t matter if the room was lit by football lights, I still won’t be able to concentrate long enough to read what’s on the page. Mum and Dad are right when they say I’ve got ants in my pants. I’ve always been that way, but since last year it’s like I’ve got a colony of them crawling all over my body and niggling at my brain. I must concentrate, but the harder I try, the worse it gets. At primary school I used to get extra help from Mrs Lowes – she helped everyone in my class, so nobody really noticed. But at secondary school it’s different; I didn’t get help at all in the first term. After Christmas, Mrs Hudson, the support assistant, thought it would be a good idea to sit with me in maths and English, but it felt like everyone was staring at me, which made concentrating even harder. I told her I didn’t need her help. All I wanted to do was get rid of her, because having her sitting beside me was more embarrassing than going to town with your mum. So now I just have ‘catch-up’ lessons instead.

I open my maths book as Granddad sits in his chair and flicks through the TV channels – Das Erste, Bayerischer Rundfunk, ZDFneo, RTL. There are pictures of floods in Bremen, people marching down the street in Munich, and bolts of lightning flashing across the sky and hitting the TV tower in Hamburg. Then the picture switches to a reporter talking outside the parliament building in Berlin. I see it every day of the week because Granddad has a satellite dish that beams all the German TV channels into his sitting room. He can get English channels too, but mostly he just watches the German news. He says it’s one way he keeps in touch with Germany. The only other way is when he goes to meet his friends at the German Friendship Group every Tuesday. He took me once when I was little and I thought it was scary because it was full of strangers talking in a language I didn’t understand. Grandma said I came home crying, but I don’t remember that bit.

Back on the TV, the picture changes back to the floods with people being rescued from their houses by firemen in yellow dinghies. Then the picture flicks to people gathered in a hall with blankets around their shoulders. It’s like . . . It’s like Noah and . . .

‘How big was the ark, Granddad?’

‘What?’ Granddad turns round.

‘Noah’s ark, Granddad,’ I say. ‘Was it as big as an ocean liner? Or bigger . . . like an aircraft carrier?’

Granddad shakes his head. ‘Felix,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you are really confusing me.’

‘I know, Granddad, but just say how big you think it might have been. Would have to be massive to get two of every animal on.’