Sometimes you are on thin ice. Very thin ice

I’m sat on a living room chair drinking a decaf coffee. Trying to help with Pythagoras theorem. You remember that one. ‘In any right angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides’. A perfectly fine theorem spoilt by including squares. Ok the squares of 2 and 3 and 4 are fine. But really the squares of numbers bigger than 23 should be banned.

Anyway I was in the zone. Drinking decaf and trying to help with maths when out of the blue…

“Dad what’s a Drag Queen?”

Trying to mop up the decaf now spilt on my lap. I spluttered out an answer while longingly remembering questions involving the square of 38…..

68 thoughts on “On thin ice”

  6. Haha! When those questions come out of the blue they really do either end up with us parents spitting out our drink or accidentally having our drink shoot through our nose. Way to go, Dad! I am sure you handled that one like a champ! 🙂

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  13. That photo looks like the field next to Poors Piece, Rose Hill Farm, Steeple Claydon, where peaceful protestors of HS2 have bunkered down to protect the trees. The field gets a thin layer of water that just settles and I am sure each time the temperature drops it will be frozen into thin ice. Cold there, but in Euston, London they really are bunkered down and are probably really warm underground.

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      1. Totally sad, for HS2 is so costly to the public purse when we need it to help the NHS and for why? To take 20 minutes off of the already under used service that isn’t going to get back to being used. Oh and it’s cutting through and destroying so much established wildlife corridors 🐾 and beautiful countryside. The wildlife as usual will suffer and there’s the trees, so many gone already… 🌳🌳🌳 Oh dear, seems I’ve started to rant again.

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  18. You were not prepared, Gary, and now it is too late, but if you really reacted to his question as you say you did, you did him a great disservice. I am not a parent, never got the opportunity. But still I have been in position to have children ask the strangest of questions. Showing astonishment of any kind tells the child they have hit a nerve. I’ve never been a boy scout either, but I can compose myself in a millisecond when necessary. Treat every question as a normal question. No spilling coffee, or snorting it either. Worse questions will be forthcoming. But why are they worse? Kids need to learn about life in all its natural states. To make certain questions unnatural, and especially unanswerable, is to give them power. Drag Queens are just men in women’s clothing, or what OverSoil said above, but I think that is too complicated for a young Hawklad. He needs to be spoken to in kanguage he can understand.
    Not that he has much choice, because of Covid, but at least he trusted you to ask the question. You need to trust him, and give him complete answers he can understand, and give them as if they are perfectly normal, because they are.
    But thanks for the comic relief. I hope you made him laugh…

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      1. I don’t want to be right, and I am truly sorry things worked out this way. I do hope you have apologised to Hawklad for your actions, and have given him a better reply to his question. There does not need to be a sexual component here, drag queens I have known are not necessarily gay, they just want to be beautiful, and women have more
        beauty products than men.
        At least one drag queen I knew was still a virgin as of our last conversation. When he dressed up he was absolutely gorgeous, and seeing both men and women gape at him was reward enough. The opposite of a voyeur, so-to-speak, a show-off, maybe? He never got love from his resentful mother, and he wanted her to see what she had created, even though she had committed suicide years before.

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      1. It’s good for kids to know there are a lot of different experiences and people, and they’re all fine.

        My adult friends are learning the modern complexities of pronouns. After a lifetime of being told “he, she, they” have specific meanings, it’s hard to let go!

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