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What's your favourite one that you almost believe? And why? We're popping on our tinfoil hats and very much looking forward to your answers. (Thanks to Shezam for this suggestion.)
( , Thu 1 Dec 2011, 13:47)
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When I was wee, my family used to amuse ourselves in the interminable car journey down to Devon by counting the roadkill and guessing what it was. It was a somewhat macabre version of the iSpy books I had diligently filled in and was thus left with no more exciting things to look out for on the endless stretches of road.
"A badger!" I exclaimed, pointing out of the window with glee at a mutilated corpse on the hard shoulder.
"Don't be silly," my mum said, a smile playing at her lips, which at the age of seven I had failed to identify as I am going to troll my child for shits and giggles. "Badgers don't exist."
Imagine, if you will, the earth-shattering realisation that the world you thought you knew was a fiction. That those funny black-and-white big-rat animals were in fact entirely made-up. What else was untrue? I had already dealt, that year, with the discovery that Santa, God and the Tooth Fairy were lies. Was anything real any more?
I whimpered. "But that looked like a badger," I protested.
"They're pretend," my mum insisted. "Someone plants them on the roadside as a trick."
I accepted this. Following the Santa-revelation, I knew that if my mum told me something was imaginary, it probably was. Mistrust flickered. Was my mum one of those people who planted fake badger-corpses to maintain the deceit? It would be her style, the disingenuous cow.
For years, I took it to be true. Badgers weren't real. It stayed with me until my teenage years, when a chubby, awkward Queen of Cheesecake decided to show off her superiority by correcting someone who claimed to have seen a badger.
"Don't be silly," I said. "Badgers don't exist."
The chorus of laughter still rings in my ears.
( , Fri 2 Dec 2011, 15:29, 8 replies)
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My nephew proudly informed his class one day that the Hoover Dam was built out of old vacuum cleaners - I was so proud.
( , Fri 2 Dec 2011, 15:36, closed)
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There are lots of interesting reads this week, but only one has made me click. Ergo we have a winner. Congratulations.
( , Tue 6 Dec 2011, 18:00, closed)
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