Séamas O’Reilly: My son’s new hobby is confounding me with ‘mystyrieyos’ riddles that he puts in writing

My son is staring at me pensively. I’m drawing my thumb to my lip in the pose of a thoughtful man, a great thinker putting the sum total of all his wisdom to the task put before him. The task in question is a riddle he’s posed, since complex logic puzzles have become his new obsession. I pore over the paper he’s handed me once more – like any good Batman villain, or Jeremy Irons’s character in Die Hard with a Vengeance, he’s provided the riddle in writing – and consider its wording once more.“Tina is a police officer,” it reads, “She walk into a mystyrieyos world with treasure she meets a citizen and doesn’t know what direction to go, so she asks the citizin something but the people there only awnser only to strangers once (tina is a stranger)”. There’s a lot to take in. For one thing, I feel there may, some day, be an inspiring four-part Netflix documentary about his attempt to spell the word “mysterious”.“So, Tina is asking for directions?” I ask, dubiously, “for the treasure?”READ MORE“Yes,” he says. “Well, can’t she just say, ‘Which way is the treasure?’”“No,” he tells me, astounded at my ignorance, “she can only say one thing to them, but they can’t say anything to a stranger.” “Hmm,” I say, before quietly adding that this was not clear from the riddle as originally worded.In ancient times, I would have undertaken this process at the lip of a mossy cave on the Grecian coast. A farmer, perhaps, wondering why my harvest had collapsed. A king seeking advice on how to rule. There, my oracle would have rummaged through a bird carcass before delivering their cryptic message. My son merely stares at me intently across the kitchen table, sucking on a tube of liquid yoghurt.[ ‘Would you rather have no stomach or no bum?’ my son asksOpens in new window ]I provide various other answers, each of which he bats away, citing ancillary rules – at least five of which are not present in the original wording, but who’s counting? – until finally I give up.“She has to say, ‘Hello! I’m Tina’,” he tells me, “and then she’s not a stranger any more!”Like all of his riddles, there is the nugget of something clever here, albeit shielded behind layers of opacity. This is because he sees these riddles on YouTube and, in his haste to transcribe them, misremembers key details, or else omits them so as to stand a better chance of stumping me. And stumping me is the true prize, sending him on the delighted jig – a literal merry dance – he is now performing around the kitchenSoon, it’s my turn and I motion toward the hits. “A boy is rushed to the hospital with a broken leg,” I say. “The doctor takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son”. But the doctor is not the boy’s father. How is this possible?”He adopts the face of someone who’s just been asked to calculate the square root of a garden gnome. He asks me to repeat the words again. And again.Sometimes in parenting, you get an illicit thrill from seeing your child grapple with a well-worn phenomenon for the first time. When he was a baby, nothing thrilled me more than seeing him experience his first lick of ice cream. Not least since, two minutes later, I got to see its opposite when he experienced the nerve-shredding horror of his very first brain freeze. A few years later, I had a similar sense of vertiginous delight when he came up to me at a Christmas party and said “Daddy, I love this song!!” in response to me playing that little-known cult classic Jingle Bells.And here he was, agonising over the oldest riddle – and most salutary lesson in entrenched sexism – in the book.“He’s adopted!” he tries.“It’s a robot boy that just looks like his son!”“His son doesn’t have any legs so the doctor is an impostor!”“No”, I say, with the calming voice of a Galilean carpenter, as if these words were my own invention, “the doctor ... is his mother!”My son very nearly swoons with delight, as realisation of his ignorance – and some latent presumptions about the roles of women in the workforce – washes over him. He’s been stumped, but it feels good. So good, he immediately sets to writing another riddle down to beat me in turn, almost certainly leaving out enough details that it will become his own in the telling. A riddle that’s grand, a riddle that confounds. A riddle more mystyrieyos than I could ever dream.