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.