He's finished his third novel, is adding Mandarin to his language library and is keen on particle physics. But what does Michael Dowling, 11, make of chips, sweets and his peers? Zoe Williams finds out

Michael Dowling is 11 years old and has an IQ of 170. This puts him in the top 0.2% of the country. I would have trouble putting an age on him, down the phone, not because of the preternatural intelligence, but because he has a very easy conversational manner. I know for a fact that one normally doesn't become comfortable talking to strangers over the phone until the age of 27.

Michael is one of the high-achieving children in a new Channel 4 series which documents the lives of 10 gifted children growing up in the UK and regularly updates us on their progress, Seven-Up style. He has just delivered his third fantasy novel to the publishers, which he wrote with his mother, Diana, an Oxford don.

"I think that any child can write a book," he says, and it is strange to hear him describe himself, even obliquely, as a child, when he sounds so unlike one. I don't think he really thinks of himself as one, either. I think he is just being polite. "It's just difficult physically to write it, because your ideas are always sprinting ahead. I think I can see myself having ideas to write for the rest of my life. The only problem is, will I learn to write fast enough to keep up with my ideas? You can hear 40 words per second, you can think 120 words a second. Writing is probably about two per second." I want to be the first person to introduce him to the concept of sitting about, staring at a wall, but it doesn't come out right.

I am fascinated when great gifts reveal themselves in children (I think Tiger Woods finishing a golf course at 18 months might be one of my favourite stories), so, after we have cleared the hurdle of whether or not he would call himself gifted - "I dislike the term gifted. It's sort of a label. It's put on people just because they're more intelligent than other people, in one area or several" - I ask when his parents first thought he might be, you know, differently abled. "It was really when I learnt to read, when I was about four. I was reading books at five which several 12-year-olds would probably enjoy."

His first memory is "falling down the stairs outside my house. Rather strangely, I remember it in the third person, which is impossible."

His parents sent him to the Dragon, a prep school in Oxford; I don't think it's actually in the phone book as School for Geniuses, but you would feel a lot more like a fish out of water there not knowing Latin than you would, say, knowing it. Nevertheless, it had its disadvantages: "I was spending about 14 hours a week in the car; it was far too long, it was absorbing all of my life. And various aspects of the school were not quite up to scratch."

Now he is home-schooled, with fencing on the side and exercise periods: "I usually go for a run to the loch and back, and then run over on various pieces of exercise machinery we have at home, then I do sit-ups, then I do sprints because I'm trying to raise my VO2 max, which is the maximum consumption of oxygen per kilogram of muscle."

You can imagine, when people meet him for the first time, their nodding sagely at him and then having to look up half the things he's said when they get home. That's what I had to do, anyway.

At the moment I guess Michael's proficiency as polymath is the most distinctive thing about him. He had a grounding in Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon ("which is great fun"); he remembers later that he studied Hebrew for two years, between five and seven, and he is currently learning Mandarin "but I can't speak it, because it's mainly a written language. But I know some Chinese. I can say 'four slices of bread'." He then says "four slices of bread", or at least, I assume he does. "The only problem is," he continues, "will I learn to say, 'Please may I have?'"

I could honestly listen to him all day . . . he talks with such precision and care, and he approaches everything with such idiosyncratic seriousness. Like chips, for instance. He's a very keen cook of medieval feasts, but I want to know whether or not he likes chips.

"I despise McDonald's because it is a global corporation and it's speeding up global warming by cutting down the Amazonian rainforests. And chips, chips would be OK if they were home-made and nice, but most aren't, and the ones that are home-made usually come from a nearby shop. They're too sweet or soggy." And sweets? "Sweets contain far too much sugar, which makes your blood sugar rise and fall. You're not even a person, it turns you into a bouncy, hyperactive bunny and then in no time into a gloomy, hungry person."

The obvious question, here, is how he gets on with his peers; he dispatches this rather elegantly. "Not meaning to be impertinent, do you like every adult that you meet?" "No, not at all," I say. "Almost none of them."

"You don't choose your friends for IQ either, they might be funny or have amusing conversation or you might like them for other reasons. I've been particularly lucky in that several friends of mine are almost as intelligent as me."

When he grows up, Michael would like to be a doctor, and investigate brain disorders. He is also interested in particle physics - four particles in particular - but unfortunately I didn't even catch enough of them to look them up. This surge of scientific inquiry surprises me - I had pictured him in All Souls or somewhere similar. "I'd like to be able to continue various private hobbies of my own in a certain amount of peace," he avers, monastically. Seriously, you could listen to him all day

· Child Genius, Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm.