#1 is a genius. Everyone knows this. I have a few highly intelligent people in my family. Nothing about highly intelligent people is average. The recurring theme with highly intelligent people is that their life ‘experiences’ are not average. 

Today #1 lost his keys. 

Normal people lose their keys down the side of the sofa, under the book, I found my phone today in the cereal cupboard. All average. 

We searched and searched. My house isnt enormous. He’d only been in the house for about 2 minutes before he noticed the keys were lost. He’d walked in, gone to the kitchen, opened a drawer and noticed his keys had ‘disappeared’. We searched. We retraced steps. We sat and contemplated. We searched the same places again. We looked in random places ‘just in case’. We looked and looked. It was a mystery. 

I looked to see if his car could be abandoned until they turned up. 

It would mean I couldnt go to work because he’d parked in front of my drive but otherwise it was possible. Imagine THAT phonecall: “I’m sorry, I can’t come to work today: my son has lost his car keys”. Of course, they know me now, they’d probably shrug and say “we expected it one day”. 

I rang my dad to ask if he had a spare key (its really my dad’s car he bought as a spare; doesnt EVERYONE have a spare car?) 

But mainly I rang my dad to ask his advice. My dad knows the answer to everything. 

Stop the world! This is serious! 

MY. DAD. DID. NOT. HAVE. A. SOLUTION. 

NOW I was worried. 

So we searched the same places again because it MUST have returned from its holiday by now. 

Nope. 

Mack contemplated the relative probablity of the keys ‘disappearing’ into thin air. 

He decided it was possible. 

But he’d had an hour to let his genius do its magic. 

It must have fallen into a hole in the wall. 

I told him not to be so stupid. Keys dont fall in holes in kitchens. Kitchens dont have holes. 

We looked again in the same places because we obviously didnt look properly the first five times. 

Mack shouted ‘there they are: in the hole, in the kitchen’. 

Of course. 

Because only a genius can lose their keys (a car key, with a Tesco Clubcard fob, on a lanyard) down a hole in a kitchen. 





It took another 20 minutes and another phonecall to my dad to retrieve the keys a foot down this hole. 

Keys retrieved. 

#1 left within a millisecond. 

Im going to have to come up with an even more obscure method of keeping him in the house.