All Growed Up

Despite only being 26, I start to feel older and older beyond my years as each day passes. 

Physically I am in the worst shape of my life, with fitness taking a priority level even below writing, and we all know how slack that’s been recently. I only have to think about starting a new form of fitness or getting healthy and my body provides me with a new set of aches, pains and strains to worry myself with (check out my last blog post if you don’t believe me!...), all the time whilst seeing, what feels like daily, news bulletins of 70 or 80 something year old men and women still cycling or running to work every day or other such feats (such as today's London Marathon!) that put me and my 26 year old body to shame!

Telling myself that my body is no longer 16 to 19 years old and in my youthful prime and me actually realising it are too very different activities. 

With my body providing continuous challenges to my intention to get fit and healthy, I started to wonder at what point I should accept that I am getting older? I guess this is easy to do with the body, if it doesn’t like the way you do something, it will soon tell you. The mind however is a much more complicated matter. This part of the body can add to the physical issues or alternatively can help you break through them. So if I accept that my body is getting older (don’t get me wrong, only being 26 I know I can break through these barriers and regain at least some of the fitness I once knew), but do I also have to accept the same fate with the mind?

We all have to mentally grow up sometime...don’t we?

Growing up means something different for everyone but because there is no one definitive milestone to go through for this, it is hard to judge what defines being “grown up”?

My best example of this is having children. 

Over the past 12 months three of my sisters’ closest friends have all been expecting babies and thus are now in the process of having them and/or have had them. These are people that have been close to my sister since childhood, & as I am only 3 years younger I've somewhat “grown up” with them too. So surely them starting a family is a sign of growing up & getting older & therefore surely I should at least be starting to feel like I'm growing up?

So why is it that with all the talk of babies around at the moment, my first thoughts weren’t of “OK, so I need a life plan!” or “That will be me someday I guess I better be prepared” but instead were of a potential naming convention & the social implications that would bring?

Certain cultures already ensure that new borns are pre-fixed with certain meaningful names dependent upon their sex.
However my naming convention steers itself more down the route of modern day “celebrity”,with naming your child after the place they were conceived (think Brooklyn Beckham, Paris Hilton (whose birth certificate I’m sure also displays the room number of said hotel, but that’s merely speculation!) or Jordan...oh wait that's not right, anyway you get my drift).

Well imagine that convention was mandatory?!
You would still have family surnames, the origins of which have long defined our standing in society but an additional naming convention would surely develop a class system all of its own?!

Let me set the scene…

It is the second week of September and Primary schools all around the country sit down for the first time that school year with a new year group of fresh faced 4 year old children. The remnants of a long 6 week sunshine filled summer still flicker through the window and teachers address their pupils for the first time (I imagine writing your name on the board in chalk is no longer allowed so there will be some elaborate graffiti spelling out the teachers name somewhere on the wall behind them). The teacher reaches in to their drawer, pulls out a shiny new register, prefilled with the names of these new pupils ready to embark on the next stage of their educational adventure (having been one of these once myself I am also sure that half of the boys in the room are also ready to go home and play with their new train set or fire engine but that’s neither here nor there). After carefully opening the register to the correct page, not wanting to add too much of a crease to this new book on day one, the teacher then precedes to read through the list in alphabetical order by surname…

Teacher:“Somerset Adams”          ("Here")

Teacher:“Chorley Brown”            ("Here")

Teacher:“Roma Carroll”               ("Here")

Teacher:“Dudley Evans”              ("Here")

Teacher:“Llandudno Jones”         ("Here")

Teacher:“Dubai McAllister”        ("Here")

Teacher:“Skegness Taylor”         ("Here")

And so on and so on…

Now, I am certainly not going to offend anyone by making light of who would sit in which class system with the names mentioned above (despite being quite proud that I may have inadvertently created a cult vigilante superhero in the form of“Llandudno Jones”!), I will let you do that for yourselves (do feel free to comment or let me know what yours would be) but it does give you an insight in to how much of a tangent my brain can steer off in to.

This is why I know that I am yet to grow up! And I am probably a long way off doing so.

Who knows when that day, if ever, will come but for now I am going to enjoy being the one who sees something most would consider normal & then running off with it screaming “nerrrr nerrrr ne nerrrr nerrrr”...that world is much more entertaining!

It is this same brain that sat at work last week looking over multiple spreadsheets and came across a cell that read “YTD”. I’m sure most of you are familiar with this acronym but for those that aren’t it simply refers to “Year to date”. To most, this would be where this story ended...not me!

Suddenly my brain saw the word “year” and realised that it rhymed with “rear”, which then segwayed my mind nicely to the “Rear of the year” awards.

Not in a crude way, before your minds wonder off on a tangent of their own but to the thought of how much better it would be if the organisers had named them the "Bottom of the year" awards. This may not hold the rhyming potential that the words “Rear” and “Year” do but as my version could then be shortened to “BOTY awards” or "The BOTY's”, it’s a Marketer’s dream, surely? 

Now as they have preferred to call it the "Rear of the year" awards instead, I can't help but feel they've missed a trick, especially as the acronym of their choice would be the “ROTY’s”! Nowhere near as marketable, I think you’ll agree?!

So I guess my point is (yes that’s right, I do have one!), do I really have to grow up at some point? Will I know when it happens? Are these people that are supposedly “growing up” around me actually growing up or are they still the same people and actually you never have to, you merely just switch your priorities around slightly and appear like you know what you are doing?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not childish in my day-to-day actions, the days of knee slides at weddings and whoopi cushions at family parties are gone...well, it’s not long gone but it’s gone nonetheless. All of these thoughts are solely centred on the way my mind works.

Mentally I guess I am in some kind of transition. Perhaps I’m over thinking it? Perhaps not?

Either way I guess I’ll only find out the answer when I reach my final years, as I sit back and reflect upon life, pinpointing the exact life event that triggered my transition to a real “grown up”. Or (and we all know this is more likely) sitting back laughing to myself as my great-grandchild is introduced to me for the first time, filling me with extreme pride and happiness, but also leading my mind off to consider “I wonder what he or she would be called if that naming convention had taken off”?

Yours sincerely,

Shrewsbury Brown

P.S. For those of you not only still with me, but also debating with yourself the pros and cons of the aforementioned naming convention, I think you’ll agree my name above is a proverbial curveball to the system, providing both the commonality of “Brown” as well as the class definition of its own depending upon how you pronounce “Shrewsbury”. The latter being a topic of a potential future blog post all by itself. But for now, I’ll let you decide!