Warming Up

It was 6.30am and I was- not unreasonably- asleep in bed, when my then four-year-old son shook me awake. “Dad,” he shouted urgently, “Dad?”

“What is it?” I spluttered, half-awake and half-asleep. Was the house on fire? He certainly seemed alarmed enough for it to be something that serious.

“Do ghosts have bum holes?” he asked.

Now, that one would be a tough one to answer at any time of the day, and before I could think to postulate a response, I had questions of my own swirling around my head.

Principally “What on earth has made you ask that question?” Also, “What have you just seen?” and mainly,“Why couldn’t this wait until I am awake?”

It was an excellent question though and one that I confess I had never considered. As a diligent father I want to do my best to answer anything my kids ask me, as honestly as is reasonable, but like every parent the children will ask me questions that are beyond my pay grade (“How does electricity work?), difficult to answer for various reasons (“How does the Easter Bunny make her eggs?”) and as in the case of this early morning alarm call, actively impossible.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it though. I’d never heard of a ghost showing it’s bum hole. Indeed, most ghosts seem to have clothes on, so it’s very hard to tell. Are ghosts able to take their trousers down if they wish? Even if they aren’t, is there a bumhole still in their pants? You can see right through them, of course and yet you don’t generally see their internal organs, so are they just a photocopy of their external part and what they looked like when they died and thus anything that wasn’t on the outside no longer exists? Also why do you not hear about more naked ghosts? A lot of people must die with no clothes on, yet every ghost I’ve heard of is clothed. Are the nude ones just too embarrassed to come out?

I spluttered out an answer. I don’t even remember what I said, but I know that Ernie left unsatisfied. And I never got to find out if he’s just been mooned by a ghoulie.

There’s lots of questions that your kids ask you that you can look up on the internet (or in an encyclopaedia if you’re weird) and get a definitive answer. Where do you go for the impossible questions?

I thought it would be a good idea to create a resource where parents could suggest impossible questions and I could research these questions and talk to experts and attempt to provide a definitive answer. I set up a Twitter account (sorry, not going to call it by it’s new name) to see if other parents had impossible questions and discovered it wasn’t just me being plagued by this stuff, like:

If no-one made God, and He's always been there, then how did He get there in the first place?

Will Father Christmas Die? What if the world gets sucked into a black hole?

If you had a middle hand, what side would the thumb be on?