Yesterday we had double PPF before lunch. Leaplings don’t do history, we do PPF, which stands for Past, Present and Future. We take PPF in Block T, away from the main school building and built in the shape of a capital ‘T’. The further up the school you go, the more lessons you have in Block T. We don’t mix with the Eleventh Years until after the first Leap trip. PPF’s my favourite subject. I got a Level 4, which is exceptional for a Seventh Year.

Yesterday was important in the PPF curriculum. Our teacher, Mrs C Eckler, gave us final information about the Leap 2048 trip to the Time Squad Centre. The Time Squad is like the Crime Squad, but it solves crimes committed across YEARS rather than countries, like if you kill someone in 2020 and hide the body in 1960. It only has four members of staff and is also top secret.

In Seventh Year you go to the future because it doesn’t matter if you get things wrong. You have to be more experienced before you leap to the past. You do that in Eleventh Year. If you accidentally change something in the past, you rupture the space–time continuum. It’s a VERY BIG DEAL. But some people say you can’t change the past because what happened, happened. I prefer the past: you know what’s going to happen. I’d rather go back to 1968. The future is totally unpredictable.

We were given the timetable for the Leap 2048 trip last week, but Mrs C Eckler said it might change because of the weather. In 2048 it rains so much due to global warming they’ve invented new words for it, like drazzle and catdogs. I was surprised they hadn’t improved weather forecasts by then so people could plan things. I like plans. They help make things more predictable so I feel safe. When plans change, everything becomes unpredictable.

Then, Mrs C Eckler introduced us to the Meat Ration menu.

‘Can anyone tell me why meat is rationed in the future? Yes, Elle.’

‘Meat is rationed in the future because too many people want to eat it for dinner and they ran out of land to breed enough animals to be made into meat.’

After that, lots of the meat became GM, which means genetically modified. I learnt that in science. Even now, scientists can change genes to make animals grow faster or lose their horns. In the future, people became scared it would make THEM grow faster or, worse still, GROW horns, so some stopped eating meat. But millions still wanted to eat meat that wasn’t GM. So it had to be rationed.