Keir Royale

What links Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and Blog Fodder?

It’s not another lateral thinking puzzle, it is a real question with a truthful answer.

They were all born on the 12th of February - exactly 200 years ago in the case of two of them. The one that wasn’t born quite so long ago has been ruminating on Darwin’s legacy…

I think I’ve found the fundamental flaw at the heart of evolutionism. It’s not rocket science. Well, obviously.

No, I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where Darwin got it so completely and utterly wrong.

In the introduction to On the Origin of Species he maintains that “any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected”.

If this is true, then surely the reverse is also true - and anyone born with the incredibly debilitating stupid gene, which so adversely affects creationists, would naturally be at a huge disadvantage.

So if Darwin’s theory were correct, then over the course of time the stupid gene would be bred out and those that believe in the literal truth of the Bible would not survive.

But they do, and worse, they seem to be flourishing.

Clearly Darwin was barking up the wrong evolutionary tree.

Footnote from Beta Mum -
Or, the stupid gene, far from being a disadvantage, actually helps those affected by it live their allotted span in a contented bovine state, oblivious to the brutal world around them - and thus they thrive.

Where do I start?
I haven’t even mentioned the rats yet, and I can only blame the children for them if I use the guinea pigs as an intermediary.

First - the nits.
I noticed them when we got back from Christmas holidays, and I immediately set to work on Hannah’s head with my trusty Nitty Gritty comb.

I don’t normally recommend products, but this is by far the best nit comb I’ve used, and I’ve tried a few.
a) It doesn’t hurt as much as the plastic ones (I could tell by a drop in the volume of whimpering)
b) It picks up the eggs as well as the crawlers
c) It’s got a great name

So as the basin of water filled with little specks of itchiness, Ben hovered in the background awaiting his turn and taunting his sister -
“Look, there’s another one, you’ve got loads, you’re infested.”

That was at the beginning of January.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that it is now the beginning of February, and we are still not free of the little critters.

At least, we have been free of them a couple of times, but they keep returning.

It makes me want to march into school with a bag of Nitty Gritty combs shouting -

“Will you comb your kids’ hair. Here, take one of these, they work. It involves a minimum of effort. Just once a week and you can save your offspring and mine from scratching - forever.”

But of course I can’t do that. And neither can the teachers. We just have to carry on combing and plaiting and groaning and scratching.

Ben has escaped the latest thrice weekly programme of scraping, presumably because he is always a kick’s length away from his nearest playmate, and his break-time involves no head-to-head exchange of secrets and whispers.

Poor Hannah has born the brunt of it, and she’s fed up of having her hair in plaits every day.

And then there are the worms.

At least we’re not on holiday in France. I once had to mime the condition to a bemused pharmacist in front of a queue of immaculately dressed French people.

Here, the lady in Boots could at least understand the terminology. So that should be sorted - for now.

The verruca was due to be zapped at bedtime - until I read the packaging.

“The freezing procedure will cause a painful, aching or stinging sensation that can take a few hours to fade”
Not an auspicious addition to the bedtime routine.
So that’s been delayed until the morning, if there’s time for an extra task in our daily parade of breakfast duties.

And what of the rats?
I saw one in the garden the other day. I thought I may have imagined it, but then I spotted a nest of holes next to the heating oil tank. They look like rabbit holes, but smaller. The size of rats.

I’ve delegated the problem to Blog Fodder.
He has been to the garden centre in record time and returned triumphant with something called Rat Killer, which “targets and kills rodents humanely” and is “free from poisonous chemicals”.

Presumably it’s not free from chemicals that are poisonous to rats, but perhaps it means we can rest easy when the children go out to dig in the mud.

And how can we possibly blame the children for these uninvited new pets?
Well apparently rats like to set up home near a source of rodent food, and our back garden contains a plentiful supply of abandoned guinea pig chowder, carelessly strewn ‘twixt shed and cage on its way to sustain Phoebe and Sandy.

And why do we have guinea pigs in the garden? Because we have children.

Ergo - the rats are here because of the children.

I rest my case.

I’m a fan of lateral thinking puzzles, and now my children like them too.
You know the kind of thing - a man, a puddle of water and a measuring tape.

The children were reading them out to each other, when Ben was offered this little gem…

A man and his son are in a car crash. The father is killed and the child is taken to hospital gravely injured.
When he gets there, the surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy - for he is my son!!!’
How can this possibly be?

If you don’t know the answer, stop and think.

If you do…

I remember a time when I found this a tough one to answer.
But Ben (who’s ten) said -

“The dad’s dead, so the surgeon must be his mum. What’s so hard about that?”

What a star, unsullied by the preconceptions of a previous generation.

It seems my hard work and indoctrination has had some impact since the day he said on the way to school -
“But a woman can’t be prime minister.”