Once every few weeks, our music-loving Isaac latches on to a new song, which he insists I download to my iPod so he can listen to it repeatedly at leisure. A couple of days – and 100-plus plays later – you will then typically find him wandering around the house singing the lyrics of said song to himself, or belting it out from the back seat of the car.
This week’s track of choice is Pink’s new single, Raise Your Glass. Which struck me as quite apposite, given that it is something of an anthem for the geeks, freaks and misfits of this world, with its hook of:
So raise your glass
If you are wrong
In all the right ways
All my underdogs
(The title of this post is also a lyric from this song.)
Not that I’m saying Zac is a misfit – in fact, socially he seems absolutely normal for an almost three-year old – but as I have said in previous posts he has certainly shown signs of developing into a tech geek. He wields my various iDevices with an intuitive ease which belies his tender age, and he has also mastered the operational basics (stop, pause, rewind) of our Sky+ remote control.
And while, like other kids, he will use crayons for drawing, colouring in and experimental interior decorating, only a geek would – completely unprompted and without assistance – take six crayons and declare “I’m building a hexagon” to his suitably impressed grandparents, as the photo below illustrates.

I haven’t yet gleaned from him the significance of the four different colours which he specifically picked out for the task. Either he was trying to make a plain benzene molecule a bit more colourful, or it’s possible he may have selected them for the purpose of showing me his understanding of DNA base pairs. (In case it turns out to be the latter, I have just quickly reminded myself that adenine forms a pair with thymine, while guanine matches up with cytosine, and I am reciting it to myself in my head over and over. until it is committed to memory. You can never be too prepared when you have an inquisitive child.)
And, 48 hours from his first signs of interest in the song, he has already committed the chorus to memory, although he has yet to really let rip. Don’t worry, though, he’ll have it ready for public performance in time for next week’s X Factor. In the meantime, here he is in rehearsal:
So maybe he will turn out to be a geek. But he’s a happy geek. And as long as he stays that way, I will be delighted to be a happy geek’s geeky dad.