We recently went to visit my brother’s family, including our niece Beti. Beti is nine, and Hannah and Lauren idolise her. She’s a wonderful girl – funny and sensible in just the right proportions – but sadly, in the company of Hannah and Lauren, she occasionally deteriorates into a third cackling loony.
We were driving out somewhere, and for reasons that were never fully explained to me I was taking the three girls while the other adults all got to go in a separate car. En route, we drove past one of those dinky little Smart cars.
“Look at that car!” said a voice from the back seat. “It’s smaller than a person!”
There followed a good minute of helpless cackling.
“Yeah,” said another voice, “it’s smaller than a dog!”
More cackling. Now Beti chipped in.
“It’s smaller than a rabbit!”
And so on. The smaller it got, the funnier it got – mouse, grasshopper, ladybird, drop of blood (!), until eventually we got to “smaller than a mouse’s whisker”. At that point the back seat finally fell quiet as three little brains tried to think of something even smaller than a mouse’s whisker. I began to wonder if Beti had encountered any microsocopic life forms in her science lessons yet, but I needn’t have bothered. One of the twins happily provided the answer to the conundrum.
“It’s smaller than Daddy’s winky!”
My attempts to stop the game at this point were ignored.
It was only later that the paradox occurred to me: that my “winky” is alleged to be not only smaller than a mouse’s whisker, but also (if we re-examine the original premise) larger than a car. This is hardly the blog to discuss such things in detail, suffice to say I would happily settle for somewhere in between.
