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".)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

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 ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

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