If Damon Blundy wants to add luster to his sad little life by trashing me week after week in his column, can I suggest that he judges me for the shoplifting problem I had as a teenager that lasted into my early twenties? Oh, sorry, I forgot—Blundy doesn’t know about that because I never got caught. Perhaps he’d like to admit that he has no idea what kind of person I am—good, bad or indifferent—just as I have no idea what kind of person he is, though I do know, as we all do, that he chooses to behave for much of the time like a vile bigot. But we mustn’t let his bigotry, disgusting though it is, blind us to his foolishness. It is tempting to assume that those who offend and upset us are telling hard truths that we can’t stand to hear, but sometimes, as in the case of Blundy, they are as wrong as they are unpleasant. Only a fool would imagine that my decision to send my son to a state school was in any way controversial or a matter of public interest. Thanks to my relationship with Harry, I was in the fortunate position of knowing enough about Gorse Edge and its staff to trust it completely, but even if that hadn’t been the case, I would have sent Toby to his local state primary school because I believe in state education.

I choose to behave like a vile bigot? Oh, Paula, that’s not fair. No one chooses how to behave—not you and not me. Free will is the greatest lie we’ve ever been sold as a species. If humans have free will, why would Bryn Gilligan spend all day and night on Twitter, engaging at length with creep after creep on the subject of whether or not he ought to end his life? Why would Reuben Tasker imagine there’s any point in his forbidding me to read any more of his books since I evidently don’t appreciate them? Why would Keiran Holland attack me for lobbying to strip Tasker of his Books Enhance Lives Award? Having done no such thing, I’m a little baffled. I thought I’d been arguing to give Bryn Gilligan back his Olympic medals, and merely using Reuben Tasker as a convenient analogy. I’m equally baffled as to why Holland should feel the need to explain to me in such detail the difference between Olympic sprinting and a horror novel. In case any of you have been waiting for clarification on this point, here’s a small extract from his lengthy treatise on the subject:

A novel is the product of a process; it is not the process itself. Reuben Tasker’s artistic creation is his novel, not his ability to write a novel, whereas Bryn Gilligan’s product is his ability to run fast and nothing more than that. In competitive sprinting, product—the sprint sprinted—and process are interchangeable. A race does not last through the decades or the centuries, and so is inseparable from the ability to run, which is why that ability mustn’t be chemically enhanced. In the case of a novel, we do not and should not care how it came into being, only about what it is.