A few weeks ago, I wrote about the joys of being interviewed. My claim, repeated here for those who missed it, was that I much prefer the act of being interviewed to actually interviewing someone, because there’s just a lot less work involved in sitting there while someone asks things of you, as opposed to having to prep questions, manage a crowd, and deal with someone else’s responses (or indeed lack thereof).
As someone who has done both things many times, this has long been my preferred choice, but litigating it in print has prompted quite a bit of debate from readers. Many people, including several of my fellow writers, popped into my mentions on social media to either agree wholeheartedly, or else maintain that being interviewed is actually more stressful because there’s a much greater spotlight on you, whereas any time you act as an interviewer you can slink into the background.
I was, again, forced to reckon with the fact that a large part of my pleasure in being interviewed is likely my own desperate, grasping need for some of that spotlight, but this week I was reminded of another reason why I don’t balk under tough questioning.
Having been off school for mid-term, my seven-year-old son has had unfettered access to my earholes for an entire week and, thus, has been hammering me with questions you wouldn’t get at an Oxbridge entrance interview. What kind of questions? Every kind. Every single imaginable type of quandary, query and conundrum, from dawn to dusk, while walking, eating, playing or even in the middle of asking me other questions. I started writing down as many of these as I could remember, but quickly stopped because even a partial list would over-run this column’s word count three or four times over.
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For context, and selected for concision, here are just some of the things he asked me in one 15-minute period of Wednesday afternoon: What’s the saddest thing you’ve ever seen? Would you rather have no stomach or no bum? What was the first thing that happened in history? What’s your third least favourite country? Would you rather be the world’s greatest chess grandmaster or the world’s greatest Minecraft player? What’s the speed of smell? Has a human being ever laid an egg? Would you lay an egg if you could? Would you eat a human egg? Would you rather be really rich but everyone thinks you’re poor, or really poor but everyone thinks you’re rich? Do blue whales count as “tall” or merely “long”? Were you and your dad ever the same age at the same time?
I love my son, and long ago told myself I would do my best to listen to, and answer as best I could, his many queries about the world. Parenting is also a form of time travel, and I can’t escape the fact that his incessant questioning reminds me of my own behaviour at his age. My interrogations were notorious, and often got short shrift in childhood, since I too was intent on machine-gunning everyone I met with asinine questions until they were forced, as cordially as possible, to tell me to go away.
I remember following my Uncle Frank around his house in South Armagh, incensed that he didn’t know the difference between deciduous and evergreen plants. It occurs to me now that, as a farmer, he likely did know the difference, but was merely being polite in the hope that I would get bored and walk away. Sadly, this tactic was no use on me, and it was he who was forced to escape as best he could, within his own home, by walking into rooms which I now know were empty and closing the door behind him. I like to imagine him sinking to the carpet with relief on these occasions in the manner of someone who’s just evaded a velociraptor in Jurassic Park, only to hear me shouting fresh inquiries through the door, wholly undeterred.
So, I try to be understanding of my son’s curiosity, and tell myself he’s just paying it forward. It’s nature’s greatest trick that, if we’re lucky, we might all live long enough to suffer as parents the very things we did as children.
Well, it’s almost nature’s greatest trick. Number one would have to be the fact we can’t lay eggs. Or can we? And have we ever tried? And would I eat one if I could? And and and-
