A recorder recital.

Some truly mind-numbing dance routines.

I shook my head.

Poor Danny.

‘Are you going to be doing a turn this year?’ my mum suddenly asked me. She actually wasn’t joking, although it could easily be mistaken for some kind of sick humour.

I felt the usual prickle of shame pass from my stomach, up my spine, and on to my face, where it magically made my cheeks go red.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said quietly, and prodded some semicircles of carrot on to the far side of my plate with my fork.

Just let it go, I prayed silently, please just let it go.

No such luck.

‘He’s scared he’ll choke again,’ my idiot little brother Chris said, grinning.

I scowled at him.

‘Christopher Straker!’ Mum said sternly.

With Mum, full name equals big trouble.

Chris’s goofy grin fell from his lips.

‘Well, he did choke,’ he muttered, trying to defend his comment by rephrasing it slightly.

Mum growled.

Dad, it seemed, was utterly oblivious to the exchange and was still thinking about Danny’s star turn.

‘I’ve always wondered how stage hypnotists get people to do all those things,’ he said. ‘I mean, it has to be some kind of trick, hasn’t it? The people can’t really be hypnotised, can they?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Mum said. ‘Wasn’t there a man who was hypnotised and then died and carried on living because no one had given him the command to wake up?’

‘That was a film, dear,’ Dad said.

‘It was a story by Edgar Allan Poe,’ I offered.

‘I didn’t know the Teletubbies had first names,’ Mum said, and I rolled my eyes at her.

NOTE – ‘Teletubbies’

Many theories exist about this word, but none are particularly satisfactory. Or, indeed, convincing. Kepple in his essay ‘A Pantheon of Teletubbies’ seems sure that it is a word of deep religious significance, referring to a collection of gods or goddesses almost exclusively worshipped by children, although his evidence is seen by most scholars as, at best, fanciful.