Sorry, where were we? Oh yes, long lives. Anyway, what seems like a long time to you is the blink of an eye to lots of other species. The Llangernyw Yew is the oldest tree in Europe, and is reckoned to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old, while certain specimens of black coral have been found to be over 4,200 years old. Meanwhile, the giant barrel sponge Xestospongia muta, which lives in the Caribbean, is one of the longest-lived animals on Earth, with some such sponges now over 2,300 years old. Mind you, they don’t do a lot of shopping, your black sponges, and so couldn’t really have done much to help Wreckit & Sons stay open. Then again, Wreckit & Sons did sell sponges, so the black sponges, had they known, would probably have been quite pleased to see it close. Things that live for thousands of years tend to have long memories, and know how to hold a grudge.

13. “In a cave?”

No.

“In a very deep ocean?”

No.

“Hmm. Up someone’s bottom?”

Possibly.

14. Are you on the edge of your seats now? If we had a sound track to this book (of which more later) that kind of ending to a chapter would come with a three-note theme along the lines of “Dun-dun-dah!”

About that edge-of-the-seat business: in a sense, we are always on the edge of our seats because of electromagnetic repulsion, which means that the atoms that make up matter never actually touch one another. The closer atoms get, the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges of each atom. It’s a bit like trying to make the same poles of a pair of magnets touch: it just doesn’t work. So you may at this moment think that you’re sitting in a chair reading this footnote, but you’re actually hovering ever so slightly above it, suspended by a force of electromagnetic repulsion a billion billion billion billion times stronger than the force of gravity. You are officially a hoverperson.

V

In Which We Go on a Date—Well, Not “We” as in You and I, Because That Would Just Be Awkward, but We Go on a Date with Other People. No, Hang on, That’s Still Not Right. Oh, Never Mind. Just Read the Chapter.

THERE MAY COME A time in your life—I hope that it does not come, for your sake, but it might—when you realize that you may be with the wrong person. By this I don’t mean being in Russia with Napoleon just as the weather starts to turn chilly, or on a raised platform while a chap with a hood over his face raises a big ax and looks for a way to make you roughly a head shorter, although neither of those things would be good.¹⁵

No, what I mean is that you may ask someone out on a date, and during the course of the date you may discover that you have made a terrible mistake. You may even get a clear signal that a terrible mistake has been made. The person sitting across the table from you, or next to you in the cinema, may announce that she wasn’t sure that she was going to make the date because she was certain the jury was going to find her guilty, even though she hadn’t really murdered anyone because her last boyfriend had simply tripped and fallen on the knife she just happened to be holding at the time, ha-ha-ha, what a silly boy he was, and DON’T EVER MAKE ME MAD! Other subtle signs that you may have erred in asking someone out for an evening include: shooting the waiter for spilling the soup; laughing very loudly any time anyone dies in a film, especially if they die horribly, and everyone else in the cinema is weeping; or telling you that they’ve never gone out with anyone quite like you before, and when you ask them what that means you get the reply, “You know, a real person. One that I didn’t imagine, or build from LEGO.”¹⁶