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I drove the kids to school today. In a couple of weeks this journey will be slightly easier as we'll live in the same town as the school. But it's not too much longer a journey than the last place, which was in the next village.
Our journey was slightly held up by bin lorries. Phoebe was confused as to why these were here on a Friday, when we get them on a Tuesday. I said they had to have different routes to fit all the houses in, but she said that Hitchin was only a few miles from us, so why couldn't they do them the same day. I explained that it wasn't just a matter of driving from town to town, they had to go to every street and every house and stop and start and that took a long time.
Not unreasonably she asked why Santa couldn't just do the bins. He is able to travel to every house in the world, stop off, make a delivery, all in one night, so why can't there just be one bin day and he does all the bins?
It's a very good question. I tried to argue that he is very busy with Christmas so maybe it wouldn't be fair to ask him to take on another job, but Phoebe wasn't having any of that. He's working one day a year. He could save the world billions of pounds if he just worked another 51 days a year. No one would expect him to work Christmas week, but then neither do the bin men so that's not an issue. If he chose a different day of the week than Monday for his collection then he wouldn't even have to change the schedule for bank holidays. In a sense it's kind of evil of him not to do this. I think if you put it to a vote and made it an either/or, most people would probably choose the bin collection over the present drop. Let's put it to a worldwide referendum.
This is the kind of question that I wanted to cover in my book "Impossible Questions From Kids" which would attempt to answer the kinds of unanswerable questions that kids ask. I got an offer to write it, but it was too low to make it worthwhile, as there would be a lot of research. However I have been thinking of trying to do this project on Substack if I get the time (even though that will pay substantially less, unless a lot more of you become paid subscirbers). But if I do it slowly, a question a month then I will end up writing the book eventually I guess. We'll see.
RHLSTP Book Club is back. This week's guest is Iszi Lawrence.
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