grumpyf1

This is my 200th column for this paper. According to a survey I took this week, I’m unlikely to reach 201... Sat at my desk in the office at lunchtime recently, I saw a Tweet from the BBC with a link asking me “How does your lifestyle affect the age of your body?” and a link to an online test to help me discover the age of mine. I know the age of my body. I have a birth certificate to prove it. Still, I’d been out for a brisk 6 mile walk just days before, and was consuming my healthy lunchtime salad, followed by an apple and some fromage frais. So I felt comfortable that I’d get a result suggesting that my body, if not quite a temple, was at least a well-preserved place of interest, and definitely not a condemned building with severe structural problems. Ten minutes of clicking later, I was in for a nasty surprise. It seems the bulldozers of doom will be here to demolish my dangerous abode at any moment. I’ve not even been cluttering up the planet for half a century yet, and ...

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 EL...