A babysitter when I was five
was a gent from down the road by the name of Tim. Tim swore like a trooper, probably on account of being a trooper (well, officer-in-training as I understood it), told me the details of some 18-rated films like Se7en ("there's a bit where a guy puts a knife on his cock then shags a woman and cuts her up") and some bizarre film about a cloud which went door-to-door and murdered people with a baseball bat which I've never heard of since, and generally treated me like a teenage boy. He taught me about half of all the swear words I now know and described what firing a gun was REALLY like.

At the same time, he never went into anything truly inappropriate and carried out all the duties a babysitter should. He seemed to have some magic system for knowing what was dangerous and rude enough to make a young boy feel cool and grown-up and what was legitimately too far, not just too far according to paranoid and oversensitive guidelines.

I tried to apply his teachings when I worked in an American summer camp this year, with the exceptions that no American is impressed that you've fired a gun, so I left out my shotgun story*. This is helped by the fact that in the USA you don't get accused of being a paedophile for doing anything more personal than running away in the presence of a child, so one can talk to them properly.

Everyone should have a babysitter like Tim.

*I've fired a single-barreled shotgun twice in my life, and missed a target about ten feet away both times.
(StapMyVitals wouldn't mind a bit of that, Thu 28 Oct 2010, 15:21, 4 replies)

I'm struggling to think of a situation
in which telling a five-year-old child "there's a bit where a guy puts a knife on his cock then shags a woman and cuts her up" would be deemed as appropriate.
( Geoff the Clownfish You know Myra, some people might think you're cute, Thu 28 Oct 2010, 16:00, closed)

Agreed
but I'm massively curious to know what the other film was.
( Pig Bodine., Thu 28 Oct 2010, 16:24, closed)

Yes, I'm wondering too
Can't be The Fog, because there's no baseball bat involved. I googled it, and it just came back with this post.
( Sonic the Hedgetrimmer doesn't care what you think, Mon 1 Nov 2010, 14:57, closed)

It's not as bad as it sounds...
He was actually telling this to my seven year old brother, and I just overheard.

Okay, maybe it was a tiny bit inappropriate.
(StapMyVitals wouldn't mind a bit of that, Thu 28 Oct 2010, 16:37, closed)