I never expected to find myself envying the Koreans*.
I’ve nothing against them per se, he added quickly. I drive one of their cars for a start, and by all accounts their response to the Covid outbreak puts ours to shame. (I fear I’m in danger of becoming a Monty Python routine now: “Yes, but apart from the superbly-produced mid-range cars and the expert pandemic procedures, what have the Koreans** ever done for us?”)
No, but it turns out that this past week, the very week that I turned 52, the Koreans** have all become younger. That is to say, the country has finally adopted the international standard approach to age, which is to count it from the date of birth.
It had never occurred to me, if I’m honest, that there could be any other way of doing it but it turns out, and not for the first time, that I was wrong. The method in various East Asian countries has been to say that you are one at the moment of birth and thereafter, on 1st January each year, you (along with everybody else in the country) are another year older.
It sounds absurd (to us) and it sounds like an absolute nightmare of feast & famine for the Korean** greetings card industry – AND it means that, born on 29th June 1971, I would have officially been two in Korean** terms by the time I was, to our way of thinking, only six months old. So anyway, cultural differences notwithstanding and setting aside the question of whether my labelling it ‘absurd’ a few lines up is a bit offensive, they’ve decided to do away with it, and accordingly this week everybody’s age has been reduced by one or two years.
Sadly the BBC report didn’t give much detail so I don’t know if this has been the culmination of years and years of campaigning, or if it’s a relatively recent idea – and nor were there any vox pops from ‘the man on the street’, so I’ve no idea how it’s gone down with the population at large. I am now old enough that I have to stop and think when asked my age, so I can imagine that it would take some getting used to, to now have to remember a different age.
Probably the most surprising piece of this already-surprising news story is right at the end, where the BBC tells us that Japan abandoned this system in 1950 – and North Korea in the 1980s! I mean, I don’t want to sound all judgy, but I would have thought that if you share a border and half a name with a, well, a desperately secretive hereditary dictatorship ruled by a borderline-megalomaniac, and even THEY think it’s a good idea to start counting age like the rest of the world, then surely you wouldn’t take another FORTY years to do the same?!
All in all, it was another reminder that things I consider obvious, self-evident even, aren’t in fact anything of the sort. It’s not that long ago I discovered that, whereas in the UK we use ‘half past eight’ and ‘half eight’ interchangeably, in almost every other country ‘half eight’ means ‘half past seven’. It begs the question how many Anglo-European romances fell at the first hurdle due to a simple misunderstanding. (“I was there on time, but the English guy never showed up!”)
It’s not only things I never knew either, I also find as I get older that I’m whittling away at the things I thought I knew, discovering I’ve either not got them quite right or (more often) not right at all. So, for example, I also learned this week that despite my cast-iron certainty on the matter, Legionnaires’ disease is nothing whatsoever to do with the French Foreign Legion, and was in fact only identified and named as recently as 1976.
You live and learn, as they say. And I suppose, to put a more positive spin on it, it’s exciting that there’s always something new to discover, whether you’re nine or ninety. Or fifty-two.
Fifty-one? fifty-and-a-half? Erm…
* South
** *
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 