Tuesday, March 8, 2011

We're getting shorter


I was reading this in the Sun-Herald newspaper on Sunday, about how researchers believe that humans have now reached their maximum height potential due to advances in health and nutrition, and that the next generation may be the first in history to be slightly shorter than their parents.

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who is married to a 204cm tall man (that is, 6 foot 8 inches in the old measurements) I found this news somewhat comforting. I don't think I would want my kids being any taller than Chris is.

The sidebar story to this article was about a guy who was 208cm tall (6 foot 10). He talked about what the top four challenging things about being tall were. I asked Chris to guess what he said. He got three of them right. Difficulty buying clothes and shoes, insufficient leg room in plane seats and fitting through standard door frames. The fourth one was fitting into standard sized beds. I quite like beds with bed-ends on them but we are destined to never have one in our house because Chris wouldn't fit into it. As it is, he takes up quite a lot of the space on my side of the bed.

There are a couple of other irritating things about being tall which I have noticed since I met Chris. One is that people are always asking him if he plays basketball (he doesn't) and the other is that random strangers will sometimes just come up when we are out and ask how tall he is. When we first started going out, we were having dinner in a restaurant one night and a woman we'd never seen before came over to our table to ask how tall Chris was. Apparently she had had a bet going with her husband over whether Chris was taller than someone they knew so they wanted to sort out who was right. I was amused for a brief moment, then thought it was a little bit strange that he had become the subject of some stranger's dinnertime conversation. Like he was some kind of freak show or something.

It doesn't seem to happen quite as much now, or maybe I have just become more used to it all. He doesn't even look tall to me now so it actually surprises me when people comment about it. To me, that's just the size he is and it's become normal for us.


1 comment:

Chris said...

There's a goldmine of humour in these situations- like most things though 90% of the time its the same joke dressed up again and again.