Skyways is now the most advanced state-of-the-art housing estate in Europe. All the houses are super insulated, super solar-heated and super intelligent. When you open the front door, the house says ‘Hello’ and switches on the heating and the kettle and the CCTV for you. When it’s time for bed, the house dims the lights and switches off all screens.

And, of course, it’s right next to the airport because it all started with the airport. Old Mr Shilling used to build aeroplanes in a hangar on his estate. Planes with names like Excalibur and Guinevere because he loved anything to do with knights and chivalry. Back then, they used to call pilots ‘knights of the air’.

Anyway, his aeroplanes got so popular that the airfield turned into an airport. Then, years later, the country estate turned into a housing estate. All the streets are named after famous aeroplanes. This sounds like a nice idea, and I admit that Concorde Circus, Spitfire Street and Gulfstream Walk all sound good. It’s just a pity that a lot of planes – especially war planes – are named after extreme weather conditions and annoying insects. Hurricane Way, Cyclone Walk and Typhoon Avenue all sound like really windy places to live. The people on Mosquito Street and Wasp Lane are always trying to get the community council to change their names. Then there’s all the planes that just have numbers. Try explaining to a pizza-delivery robot that you live in house number 4 on 747 Street. Or number 52 B-52 Street.

We live at number 23 Stealth Street (a kind of bomber plane).

And then there are the robots. There are so many different species of them that Skyways is like a robot petting zoo.

Our pizzas are delivered by Pizzabot – basically an oven on wheels that says ‘Buon appetito!’ when it arrives with your pizza. The streets are cleaned by DustHogs – big hedgehoggy things that wander around all day sucking up leaves and litter through their rubber trunks. There are little DustHog hutches in the base of the solar-powered lamp posts. When their batteries run down, they back themselves into the hutches and recharge. There’s even a little DustHog dormitory round the back of the Community Hub where they all go at night after they’ve discharged their rubbish. Our wheelie bins are robots too. You throw the rubbish in, and they sort it out into recycling and non-recycling.

What do all these robots have in common? They are all really disappointing. Basically just walking, talking furniture.

Eric is not a disappointing robot. Eric is the most-not-disappointing robot you could ever meet.

As we flew over the estate, the sun bounced off his big helmet head and his breastplate chest. If you were looking up from one of the front gardens, we would have looked like a comet flashing by, taking a short cut through the solar system.

But we weren’t a comet.

We were me and Eric, and we were taking a short cut to the R-U-Recycling scrapyard . . . and Eric’s final destruction.