I was called upon to do a drop of babysitting yesterday.

Our K8 had to feck off on an urgent errand, and as usual, TAT was nowhere to be found so I was asked to look after Laughingboy and Sir Fartzalott.

For those of you who haven’t been around long, TAT [The Accidental Terrorist] is married to my daughter and therefore presumably is my son-in-law, but let’s not go there for the moment. 

I’m not used to little boys running around the place.  God bless him, but our Laughingboy never did much running around the house, being confined to a wheelchair from birth.  Little girls are no problem as Puppychild has stayed here many’s the time and of course I had all those nightmare years bringing up the daughter. 

You may ask what the difference is in a child that hasn’t even reached their second birthday, but there is a difference, and Sir Fartzalott has found it.

Obviously he has seen his sister running around in the pelt and has noticed that there is a distinct difference.  He has discovered that he has something that she hasn’t.  He has also apparently jumped to the conclusion that the reason they are different is that she is older and that therefore hers has fallen off.

Now Sir Fartzalott is worried about this.  If hers has fallen off, he has concluded that his is about to follow suit and he is determined that that isn’t going to happen.  As a result, he maintains a firm grip on it at all times.  He has become single handed, as the other hand is maintaining a firm and unyielding grip on his appendage.  It brings a whole new meaning to “getting a grip of yourself”.

At one stage during the evening he decided to climb onto the couch.  Now when you are a pint sized nipper this requires a bit of effort and is normally a two handed job.  Sir Fartzalott had a problem, because he only had one available hand.  He thought about it for a moment and decided that the best way up was to lean his top half against the couch and then to give a mighty pull to his willy to haul the lower half up.  It was a classic example of pulling oneself up by ones bootstrap.

I don’t know if you know this, but the expression “hauling up by the bootstrap” is the origin of the word “boot” in computers.  I bet you didn’t know that?  Someone obviously decided that “bootstrapping” a computer was a bit cumbersome so they shortened it to “boot”.

It occurred to me last night that but for a quirk of fate, we could all be re-willying our computers.

It makes you think.