‘Well, you’re reading it too fast. It’s supposed to take five minutes but you galloped through it in three.’

I nod. ‘So I just need to go slower?’

‘And speak up; put a bit more emotion into your voice.’ He smiles encouragingly. ‘Why don’t you try it again?’

I go back to my first card. This time, as I read I force myself to slow down and leave proper gaps between each sentence. I try to make my voice animated and I even manage to maintain eye contact for a few seconds. ‘Better?’ I say after I’ve read the last card.

‘Definitely,’ he says, nodding, but then he frowns and drums his fingers on his mug of coffee. ‘I still think you need to add something. A bit of passion and pizazz!’

I groan and flop down on the sofa next to him. ‘Passion and pizazz? Grandad, I can’t do that!’

‘Well, you managed it yesterday when you were Mega Knickers. You were on fire. Nothing could stop you!’

I shake my head. ‘Yesterday was different.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I had a costume on … I was talking to children.’

‘Hey, I’ve still got the costume!’

I laugh. ‘No way am I doing this in a wig.’

Grandad thinks for a moment. ‘So why was it so much easier talking to the children?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ I think back to how I felt yesterday when all the little kids were staring up at me. ‘I suppose I didn’t feel like they were judging me, and if they did think I was weird, that was OK because to kids weird is good.’

‘Meg, you are not weird.’ He says each word clearly, like he’s talking to a child.

I turn and look at him. ‘Grandad, experience has shown me that when I speak, people at school think I’m weird.’

‘And that is exactly the problem with your speech!’ He slaps his hand down on the sofa to emphasise his point. ‘What you see as “weird” – your passion and curiosity – I see as wonderful. Any brainy teenager who wants to win a holiday could have said what you just said … Meg, when you were five, you spilt water on a picture you were drawing. You noticed that all the colours in the paints separated so you abandoned your drawing and spent the next hour dripping water on every colour you had, working out what inks made up each colour.’

‘Totally. Weird.’

He shakes his head. ‘No, curious. You had just discovered chromatography. It was a big moment for you.’ I can’t look convinced, because he carries on. ‘For your tenth birthday you asked me for a subscription to New Scientist magazine. Meg, you called your first hamster Heisenberg …’ He frowns. ‘Why did you call it Heisenberg?’

‘I couldn’t decide what to call him and Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.’

He throws his hands in the air. ‘Exactly!’

‘You let Heisenberg escape when you were looking after him and he crawled up the back of the dishwasher and got electrocuted.’