It’s 17:10 and Grandma will be home in 20 minutes, so I need to run home. There’s still frost on the opposite pavement and cracked ice on the puddles, even though the sun came out today. I love weather like this. It doesn’t happen very often in February. Usually it’s grey, cloudy and damp. I wonder what the weather will be like in the future. If it gets warmer, we won’t get frost any more and people will read about it in history books.

I suddenly realise how cold it is, that I leapt out of school without my coat and now school’s closed. But you don’t need a coat if you’re running. You just run and run and run and feel warm inside and the air feels cool on your skin. I grab my bag and run across the school fields, the frost crunching under my feet, jump over the fence like in the steeplechase and start running up the tree-lined drive that leads to the Hill. You’d think after leaping I’d be tired but it’s the opposite. I feel like I could run a marathon.

It’s not a steep hill but it goes on for ages. It’s next to the main road, and there isn’t much traffic, so it really is like running a marathon in the Olympics when they get rid of the traffic so the runners don’t get run over. But I don’t run on the road, I run on the path. The council haven’t cut the hedge so I have to be careful not to get cut on the thorns.

There’s lots of houses on both sides of the road with their windows boarded up and piles of rubbish stinking in the gardens. You know people still live there because the bins are overflowing. Grandma says they’re flats where they put criminals when they come out of prison and have no money. The bins smell horrible. The council never empty them. I breathe through my nose, even though Mr Branch says it’s better to breathe through your mouth to get more oxygen. It’s hard running uphill with a schoolbag full of books, my geography project which I didn’t hand in, my yam and my PE kit.