How old?

Last week I spoke about some primary school girls and said they looked about 8. Last night I realised that I actually don't properly know how to estimate the age of anyone I meet - and have a particular problem with children (my earlier point about these girls still stands because they cannot be older than 11).

When I see a child I don't know if they should be in nursery or if they should be going to school or what level of school they should be at. I don't know at what age children would start talking, when they would be able to read or if they'd be interested in me reading to them. Which book should I read? I get very confused around young children.

When they reach about the age of 4 I am usually okay because - at least from the experiences I have with the children in my best friend's family - they tend to like me and want to talk to me and tell me what they want. If they want me to read to them they will usually present me with a book. If they want to engage in creative play I will usually be assigned a role by them and I can easily fulfil this. And at that age I can usually understand them and what they want me to do.

But at any age before this I am simply lost.

I try to draw on my own experience when trying to establish how old a child is and what it is that they will likely enjoy or want me to do - but I'm not sure when I learned to talk or read or walk or any of the developmental milestones that children go through. I'm not sure I was old enough to remember when my mum first started reading to me - but I do know that she started early; which explains a lot. Even if I had this information I'm not sure I can really generalise from my own case a lot of the time because I was a quick learner. I have seen pictures of myself from when I was very young (I couldn't tell you how old!) and I am playing with letter fridge magnets. I sort of remember learning the alphabet at about the age of 3 or 4 but I don't know if this is typical.

A similar problem arises when I'm watching programs such as '10 Years Younger'. They ask you to estimate the age of the person before and after the makeover. I realise that I can't do that either. What does a 40 year old look like? How can we have these estimates when we're always talking about people who look young for their age and comparing them with people who look older than they are. If nobody who is 40 actually 'looks 40', then how do we know what 40 'looks like'. And the same with any other age.

At least a part of this problem will be in the rise of plastic surgery and expensive creams and the fact that make-up can hide a multitude of sins. But I still stand by my point.

Is estimating ages something that most people can do or do other people get the same problems as I do? It seems to be that everyone else does it with little effort.

Currently listening: Parrot Stories - Alex Day

Smile (Happy Birthday Mummy)

It's my wonderful mummy's birthday today, so this is a post dedicated to her.

And I am going to use most of it to link you to this video.

My mum plays this song to me when I am sad and she would always play it when we were in the car if she was dropping me off for an exam.

It is impossible to listen to this song and be sad at the same time!

So maybe someone has been mean to you, maybe you're stressed or worried about something, maybe you've ill... I don't suppose it matters. Just listen to this song and there will be a smile on your face.

So lets all wish a HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the woman who gave me life, and SMILE for her :D

(P.S. I had plenty of ideas for a blog post today and I settled on one, then half way through writing it I decided that I didn't like it. Of course at this point I had forgotten the other ideas so this post is coming out now rather than in the afternoon when it was planned for. Normal service will resume shortly).

Post about Poetry

I am a little bit drunk, so I don't know how much sense this is going to make.

It was my mum's birthday party, please don't judge me.

I'm currently listening to Myles Dyer talking about writing poetry and lyrics and he said its a good way to put your thoughts down on paper (or a screen as it seems) and I can't help but agree with him on this.

I write poetry. A lot of it tends to come out sounding really depressing and cliché but I do my best. I like to try and look at the horrible things in the world and particularly upsetting things from my life and write them into something beautiful in the hope that this will help me to catalogue what happened in my life. Looking through my anthology is like looking through a diary of the things that have happened (only my old diaries are awful to read!).

When I write a poem it is like I'm immortalising what is happening in a way that lets me leave it in the past (such as bullying or unrequited love - both popular topics during high school) but a way that it will never be forgotten. I always date my poems as well, so I can look at the date and know how old I was and what stage of my life I was in at the time.

I often look back at old poems from a few years back and think how rubbish they would be to anyone but myself. I only still enjoy reading them because they invoke memories of old times and I feel like to anyone else they would be meaningless because they just don't have the same experiences I do.

But when I think about it and as I learn more about literature and the way critical reading works, I realise that I could show these poems to the world and although the reader doesn't have my experience they will draw on their own personal experience and apply it to what they are reading and interpret their own meaning from my words. When I studied Carol Ann Duffy in High School, I thought it was pointless to be looking at these poems and that it wasn't possible that she put as much thought into any of this as my English teacher thought she did, but after you write your own poetry you realise. No matter how bad you think it is when you read it back after a few years, it was once your best work and it once meant so much to you.

I don't think I'd be the person I am now if it wasn't for my poetry. So, even if I only like a few of the old ones now, I'm proud of everything I've written.

On a side note, I also met Carol Ann Duffy while I was in college and as well as being a very funny woman, it appears that she did put that much thought into her poems, and my interpretation was very different to her mindset when she was writing. But that's just how literature works I guess.

Another point I'd like to bring up is my muse. I never really thought of him like that at first but in the early days I was pretty much head over heels in love with him (infatuation, I'll admit) and I guess it was sort of pathetic, but it did inspire one of my most creative times and two of my best poems. One of these poems was destroyed (because I am an idiot) and I spent a lot of my time slagging him off with my best friend at the time. The other still exists and in my mind is one of the best poems I've written.

I didn't speak to him for almost two years and only wrote one poem in this time - for a competition at college - but after reconnecting a few months ago I wrote two and have another two in the works.

One of the written poems is about the destroyed poem mentioned earlier and my own melodrama and the other is inspired by my growing up and having to try and find myself as an adult in a new place, maybe I will share them at some point.

I guess the whole point of this rather extended (and possibly nonsensical) post is to thank Adam. Although he feels that he's not done much, he has helped to drive my creativity and make it worth writing things down. He is always the first to read my work and I think this is something he will always have privileged access to, as long as he wants to of course.

I don't know if I'm reading too much into this

I'm doing a sponsored swim (shameless plug: www.justgiving.com/MiniChannelSwim) so I've been spending a lot of time at the pool recently. You get to see an odd cross section of people when you spend a lot of time in one place - from the old women who are trying to stay mobile to the semi-professional swimmer who has their own swimming hat and nose clip to the cocky but attractive lifeguard and not forgetting the fat guy who is actually fitter than I am. It's almost a fascinating study of human behaviour if I wasn't too busy concentrating on breathing properly so as not to drown.

As much as I find myself fascinated and interested at the kinds of people I see, I also sometimes get a shock. It usually comes when I see someone I know but don't like or a type of person you wouldn't expect to be doing serious exercise.

But today I got more than a shock. I was so horrified by what I heard I had to start blogging again just to tell you.

The local schools take the children swimming once or twice a week and they put all of the girls in one big changing room and all of the boys in another with one member of staff each. The children all run in and unlock the door while the teacher signs them in. It's how we did it when we were young and obviously it still exists because I've seen it three times in the last two weeks.

But today, as a bunch of primary school girls (no older than 11 but only looked about 8) run in to go and get changed, I hear "No way, Katie is the skinniest girl in the class" followed up a few minutes later by "I'm only joking Katie, you're not really".

I was horrified by this! I guess I felt like the girl was indirectly calling Katie fat. In my eyes this is almost like bullying. I wish I'd been able to catch their teacher to tell her what I'd heard, but even if I had I'm not sure if she'd have laughed at me or not.

I don't know if I'm reading too much into it from my perspective I heard a girl who is no older than 11 indirectly telling another girl who is also no older than 11 that she at least is fatter than someone else in the class.

I didn't think that girls cared about their figures the figures of other girls before at least 13, but I don't know, that's just my personal experience. Maybe because I was always thin but was an early developer when it came to breasts so I had what you would imagine to be a good figure at the ripe old age of 11, but when I was in primary school we were all busy laughing at boys and seeing how naughty we could be and still get away with it. Bullies would pick on what colour hair you had or if you were smart; not your figure.

Am I reading too far into this? Or have primary school girls really changed so much in the 7 years since I was one?