It's just a number, after all.

Hello. One of my favourite things about teaching primary school children, is the frequency and variety of insults - intentional and unintentional - that I find coming my way. Sometimes these can be surprising and delighting ("Why are you taller than my mum?" for example; or, in the moments after happening to be in the line of fire as Hiroto regurgitated his lunch: "You smell of Hiroto's sick"). Usually they have something to do with how indescribably ancient I am, which makes me happy, because I can remember saying similar things as a small child myself.

Having had a few nice episodes in the last week or so, I thought I'd commit them to paper. Um. Er. Not paper. Um. Commit them to some server somewhere out there or something. Yeah. Um.

During a lesson with year 7 last Friday, a lad in the front row was staring at me with much more interest than can be considered decent at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and after worrying that my flies were undone or that I had bread in my hair again, I finally went over to see what the matter was. He was diligently drawing a picture of me on his desk. I must say, I wasn't particularly flattered by the warts, moustache, and crows-feet.

"Is that me?" I asked.

"Yes," said Okamura-kun.

"Do I look like that?"

"No. Your eyes are smaller than this."

Well, when I was his age we used to call our teacher Grotbags behind her back ... and recalling this kept me chuckling for the rest of the afternoon. I was further amused twenty minutes later, when Okamura-kun poked his head through the classroom door to apologise for hurting my feelings.

Tuesday lunch-time, I went to help supervise a year 2 class. The immediate peril of supervising year 2s eating lunch is that you end up being vomited on, or with bread in your hair. Or maybe you don't, but I do, and with dispiriting regularity. Still, getting to tease 7 year olds more than makes up for the odd mishap, and who knows, maybe some day I'll learn to take a change of clothes with me to work.

A few of the little ones wanted to know how old I am. Whenever I am asked this, I always ask them, "How old do you think I am?"

(If you've ever been or met a small child, you'll know that the inevitable answer is, "One hundred." This seems a pretty universal tendency.)

A little girl studied me for a few moments, then asked if I have children - I do not, and I told her so.

"My mummy is forty-four," another little girl revealed. "Are you forty-four?"

"A bit less than that," I admitted.

"Are you forty-three?"

"A bit less."

"Forty-two?"

"A bit less."

This continued for some time, until between them, the two little girls had brought their top limit down to twenty-nine, at which point they determined that they were getting no-where fast, and went with, "Are you twenty?"

"A bit more than that."

Lastly, over lunch today, I was chatting with some year 7s about Christmas (I was delighted to find that they - admittedly rather tentatively - still believe in Santa). We discussed the differences between Christmas in Japan and Christmas in the UK, and I told them that my mother had made her Christmas cake the previous week-end, and that I was looking forward to having a bit. To which one boy replied, "Oh, your mother's still alive?"

Poor old mum. Yes, she's still alive, and I hope she will be for a good number of years yet.

I don't mind being thought to be much older than I actually am, not at all. It's rather a novelty. Six months ago in Manchester, I couldn't buy wine in a supermarket without ID.

On a similar kids-say-the-darndest-things theme, in the minutes before the afore-mentioned Hiroto had his tummy upset, I noticed that he hadn't eaten his cabbage, and I asked him, "Don't you like vegetables, Hiroto?"

He answered, "I like vegetables, I just don't like the way they taste."

He's a philosopher, that one.

What time is it, Eccles?

One of the most important differences between schools in Japan and those in Britain, is that Japanese schools do not employ cleaners.

This is because making children spend ten minutes at the end of the lunch break sweeping the classrooms and corridors with rather tiny brooms is considered character-building, or something along those lines.

Now, I am not inclined to disagree with this. A bit of a mindless menial task to be getting on with, a nice bit of music on in the background ... it's good for calming the kids down at the end of break, and getting them to focus on the coming afternoon.

I do have two objections, however, which I would like the school governors to consider the next time they meet ...

1. Well, they are children. The classrooms remain rather grubby at the end of the allotted ten minutes. How about getting a professional cleaner in, even, say, every other week or so? It's just that, between the chalk dust and the ... er ... regular ... dust, I sometimes feel that I'm asking too much of my poor lungs.
2. The choice of music. Basically, it needs to be more strictly regulated. For eighteen months I was daily subjected to ten minutes of a version of The Mickey Mouse March that could have been a ringtone for a Nokia 4210. And pan-pipe renditions of The Carpenters crop up altogether too frequently. This is not something I find easy to cope with on a daily basis.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. Recently one of the schools I teach at has put together a new playlist for cleaning-time, and first up is a tune I know rather well ... 'The Typewriter' by Leroy Anderson - or, as it's better known (by me at least), 'the theme to the News Quiz off of Radio 4'.

This perks me up rather nicely at 2 in the afternoon, I must say. If only the playlist continued with Ron Goodwin's 'Schickle Shamble' followed by 'The Liberty Bell March' by John Philip Sousa, and perhaps rounding off with 'The Ying Tong Song', I for one would be in a much better position to drag myself through the ultra-tedious final three hours of the day. Though I'm not promising to avoid hesitation, repetition, or deviation.