You’re only as old as I feel

Britain’s oldest person, Gladys Hooper, celebrated her 112th birthday this week, and that got me thinking.

Born the year the Wright Brothers looked at their newly finished aeroplane and said “If we run really fast and jump, we might not die”, she has outlived her younger siblings, and been both a concert pianist and built her own car hire business whilst Flappers were still shocking the Roaring Twenties.

Cue wibbly-wobbly lines to indicate we’re whirling through time...

Good Evening. Here is the MindNews for January 23rd 2115, beamed into your brain by Coca-Cola and the Brit Braincasting Corporation. It’s 10’o’Bieber. Our top story tonight:

Britain’s oldest person, Peter Grenville, has died. He was 147. Grenville, who spent the last 28 years of his life in a cupboard after going through the wrong door and stubbornly refusing to admit he was wrong, had a long and patchy career as a columnist, writing thousands of articles before being forced to retire as no-one had heard of ELO or Sheena Easton, or understood what “Seedees” were.

An only child (disputed by his two brothers) he suffered horrific injuries during the Fuel Price Riots of late 2015, when a desperate petrol station cashier tried to force £11.52 onto him, after prices went into the negative and they had to pay everyone to take fuel away. Mistakenly believing he was being made to stop drinking a cappuccino, he tried to scare off the startled employee by lighting a match.

Following extensive plastic surgery and a temporary name change to Barbara, further operations left him looking like a grumpy, tired, middle-aged balding bloke with a strange-coloured beard. Again.

He was divorced by his first wife after 93 years together on grounds that “he smells funny and keeps leaving hair in the plughole”, but went on to father 16 children with his second, third and fourth wives, who only realised their terrible mistake when they turned the lights on.

Born the same year that colour television, the “unnaturally coloured flickery picture in a big box” technology first appeared, Grenville was just a baby when Joan, Paul, Bingo and Geoff were celebrating the success of their “Sgt Poopers” MP3s, using the name “The Beatroots”.

England had recently won the World Cup Of Footballs, meaning that, like everyone else still alive, he never got to see England win the ultimate Footballerist trophy.

Radio 1, a wireless broadcast of music in a fixed order that you couldn’t shuffle, skip tracks, or make the inane babbling stop, was launched the same year, before finally being switched off in 2019 after it was realised everyone had stopped listening anyway.

He leaves behind an extensive collection of toe-nail clippings, a pair of 32inch waist jeans he’d been swearing he’d get into since 2009, and a faint smell of chocolate sprinkles, and put his exceptional longevity down to “Never smiling in public”.

And now tonight’s forecast: due to a glitch in the WeatherMaker network, today will be 21C and orange-ish.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 23rd of January 2015. It hasn't appeared on their website yet, but you can keep an eye out for it (and read some fellow columnists' efforts) on the paper's website here

To be honest, this type of column, where I make up some strange version of the future or past, are my favourite kind to write, for a variety of reasons. I don't have to stick to any facts (other than, in this case, the bit of research for the first two paragraphs), can wander off wherever my brain feels like going, and could usually just keep typing for hours. I wound up having to deliberately stop short with this one, but it could honestly have been three or four time longer at least.

It happens to be my second obituary for myself too - the first one was when I had to drop the Jenwis Hamillbutton name to continue in the Big Blogger contest. You can read that one here - I was particularly pleased with it, as it neatly referenced previous blog posts for the contest too.

It honestly doesn't seem a great step to go from this kind of thing to a full-scale go at a book-length story, and I've even got as far as making some brief notes with a partial plot, and some ideas for the opening. If the time was ever available, I think I'd genuinely have a go at writing something.

Mind you, that probably puts me in in the same category as about 90% of people who blog, and think they're a frustrated writer, just waiting to be discovered...

(Cassette heaven continues, with a TDK AD90 from 1998 of a compilation of early to mid 80's stuff called "Young At Heart".)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog