‘Oh my God!’ said Evan. He wandered over to look at them more closely. So did I. They took no notice of us, just kept on filing past like robots. ‘They’re kind of horrible, aren’t they?’ Evan said. ‘Like little monsters. Or aliens.’

‘I wonder what they’d look like if we were really small?’

We looked at each other.

‘I wish we were one millimetre tall!’ I said, and the world changed.

The blades of grass were no longer reeds, but trees. They towered over our heads, casting a green gloom. The soil under our feet wasn’t smooth but rough and chunky, full of clods and pebbles. And the ants – the ants! They were as big as rhinos now. You could actually hear the swoosh of the grass they parted, and hear their feet – if ants have feet. You know what I mean, the ends of their legs – grating on the pebbles as they tramped past.

In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, if you’ve seen that film, the kids meet an ant in the garden and make friends with it. It’s a cute ant and it communicates with them by squeaking and twitching its antennae, and it lets them ride around on its back. I have to tell you that that film is totally bogus. There’s nothing cute about ants. They’re cosmically ugly. When you see them close up in supersize it’s amazing how crude and unfinished they look, like they’re bolted together out of spare parts. They’ve got horrible, big goggly eyes which are completely empty of expression, and coarse hairs like steel wires sticking out of their legs, and great big mandibles dripping with some sort of horrible saliva. They’ve got a sort of pungent, acidic smell to them as well, like a mixture of sweat and vinegar. You can just tell, looking at them, that they have no soul, no intelligence whatsoever, they are just dumb machines blindly following a programme. Creepy or what? I felt a sudden, senseless desire to kill them. Destroy them all.

‘Shall we?’ I go.

‘What?’

‘Blast them.’

‘But why?’

‘It’ll be fun.’

‘But it’s killing for fun, isn’t it? Like hunting. And I don’t agree with hunting.’

‘Neither do I. But come on, Evan, these are ants! They haven’t got any feelings. Look at them!’

‘Well . . .’

I could see he was wavering. ‘I wish we had a bazooka each, just the right size for us to hold but powerful enough to blow up an ant!’

And there, in my hands, was this sort of steel tube with a trigger and a telescopic sight. I lifted it on to my shoulder and looked down the sight at the nearest ant. I aimed at its bulky, bulbous head and pressed the trigger.

Wham!