The one big clue I’ve got is that Aunt Kat keeps pointing to something called the Putney Debates. Seems she thought that that was when their alternate-world splits off from ours. It’s way back in 1647, right in the gap between two parts of the English Civil War.

We did this in history-class at school, didn’t we? Way too many decades ago? Okay, I think I would have been about thirteen by then, at a different school, and we didn’t really see Aunt Kat again, but I can just about scrape up some memories of some of it. From what I do remember, the debate was about politics, and Cromwell won the debate – or rather, he was losing, so he shut it all down so that he could pretend to everyone else that he’d ‘won’. A lot like a lot of present-day politicians in that regard, I guess? And a few days later, King Charles escaped from prison, which started up the Civil War all over again. That’s when the town that I live in here got trashed, for example – they’d kept well out of the whole mess before then.

But in Aunt Kat’s world, Cromwell did lose the debate – and then everything changed, right at that moment. One of those really big turning-points. But I need to find out why it was so big, for her world, and for ours.

Though the really interesting bit is that not everything does change. Or maybe the different realities kind of leak into each other? – something like that? – because even from what I’ve read so far, there seem to be all kinds of hints about their world hidden away in ours. HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, for example: his Martians are a bit like those plant-things that Aunt Kat describes, even though the plants are made, or grown, right here on Earth. Or John Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids, of course – easy to imagine the townsfolk of the Frenchman’s Diary coming up with that one. And then there’s Terry Pratchett’s ‘the Luggage’, or Hayao Miyazaki’s CatBus… –

Ah! At last! They’re opening up! – the supermarket! Get those boxes, get loaded up, get moving, go go go!