What happens after this leads to the most exciting part of the novel, and without giving away the plot, it contains skullduggery of a most amusing kind; scrapes, adventures, misunderstandings, love and friendship and a show in which the myth of Persephone is performed by the children at the school.
So rather than an incident-free run-up to its 2015 results this week, there's controversy (though not of the amusing kind) at Medway secure training centre and a spat with the SNP.
"In the ever present gossip circles," Fisher once wrote, "a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor's hunting skills, even on whether he was amusing, kind, smart".
All in all, I think it's quite an amusing book, a kind of contemporary version of Guerrin Meschino, full also perhaps of good things but good only when taken bit by bit, like a collection of short stories, and, like all collections of short stories, with a fair amount of stuff that can be discarded.
For an amusing exercise, try this kind of logic out on your boss.
The third work, by Aleksandra Verbalov, is called "C6," which Mr. Caballero said was "an amusing piece, in a very meditative kind of mood".
Scott Speedman plays another detective, though his role is more rightly that of a red herring, while an amusing Peter Stormare shows up as some kind of antiques guru with the investigative insight of Hercule Poirot.
History may one day record it as a stark irony - and let us hope an amusing one rather than the tragic kind - that on the very day that Barack Obama was sketching out to an adoring throng in Prague his vision of a post-nuclear world, North Korea launched a rocket that may one day give it the capacity to fire a nuclear warhead as far as 3,700 miles.
The result is an amusing, if not hallucinogenic, experience, a kind of cartoon vision quest, and a little peek into what the future holds for VR and the music video medium.
A vegetarian alternative would be agar-agar, which not only is kinder to the animals, but also has an amusing name.
