Preponderant ponderings on matters of chronological concern

I always liked that saying, 'be with you in two shakes of the lamb's tail'. It seems an exceedingly strange method of measuring the time, but rather pleasing in its absurdity nonetheless.

The Baron informed me today, to my surprise, that this phrase refers merely the time that the lamb will take to shake its own tail. Personally, I had always imagined that the speaker was talking as if they themselves were shaking the lamb's tail. I mean, you can't imagine that lambs would wander around shaking their own tails in a regular fashion merely to please humans, do you? This is a job we have to do for ourselves. Why humans would go around shaking lambs' tails, I do not know. Then again, there are a great many things we do not know about this world, so let's not tie ourselves into knots over this one. We probably shouldn't tie the lamb's tail into knots either, for that matter, a little shake would do.

UPDATE! - Just as it is with shaking lambs' tails, so is it with lambs' frisking, frollicking, frivolling, and gamboling on the meads. If there isn't a Department for the Management of Lambs' Frisking, Frollicking, Frivolling, and Gamboling on the Meads, there ought to be, as it is certainly much too serious an activity to be left up to the lambs themselves. It should be entirely supervised and performed by trained humans.

UPDATE UPDATE! - The Baronial Matriarch sends through this instructive video of a lamb gambolling. Please pay close attention:



Note effective deployment of bed springs for extra uplift, use of all available limbs, and frequent recourse to all four corners of the bed. Now just think how much more effective this gambolling could be if an experienced person had been in charge!

Watch the video again if you like. And again. Take all the time that you need. There is a lot to learn from it.