Age

We generally get bulletins read out to us at work by Neanderthal Boy, who spends a lot of his day skimming through news websites. This is a person who thinks exclamation marks at the end of a sentence automatically mean that someone is being sarcastic (heaven forbid that they should be, say, exclaiming) and he still is more news-aware than me. Anywho, he has just informed us that the world's oldest person has just celebrated their 128th birthday. Now, for anyone who is feeling old presently, let's think about that in proportion to the nice lady in El Salvador who has 13 children and multiple grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. My main surprise is that she's in El Salvador; who knew that somewhere that volatile could produce such an aged person. I always picture the very oldest people as living on tiny little islands in the East somewhere, with very healthy diets of fish and rice.

In comparison, my Mum, who celebrated her **th birthday on Tuesday, is nothing but a babe-in-arms, although she's not very much like a **-year-old anyway. When she was a few years older than me now, she successfully convinced people she was a schoolgirl onstage and I distinctly remember one of my friend's grandmothers at a party telling me, aged 12 and spending the night upstairs, that she looked like a girl of 17 (which I think Mum, then in her early 40s, scoffed at afterwards). So she has always been very successful at being younger, which is due as much to her young spirit as to her enviably good skin and bright eyes. Lucky Mum.