Saturday, September 01, 2007

Internet has given a new life to a 95-year-old blogger

Maria Amelia, the lively 95-year-old Spanish grandmother has achieved global fame as the oldest of the world's 63.2 million bloggers.

She was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren just eight months ago, and now she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard María Amelia López has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger internet chroniclers can only dream of.


"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxía (A Coruña - Spain) on December the 23rd of 1911," she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog."

With a mix of humour, warmth, optimism, nostalgia and feisty outbursts of leftwing polemic, she has won a regular readership of people keen to find out just what this Spanish great-grandmother is going to say or do next.

"You have to live life," the silver-haired blogger said in her most recent post. "Not sit around in an armchair waiting for death."

Her blog tracks not just a nonagenarian's day-to-day battles against aches, but offers musings on everything from politics and religion to broadband and death.

Among her chief hates are old people's homes, which she criticises for drugging their clients so they spend their final days snoozing quietly in front of the television.

"I blame the children, who don't want to help them," she said yesterday from the house beside the Atlantic Ocean in Muxía, in the rugged north-western corner of Spain, where she stays during the summer.

Some of her own words

"Old people need to wake up a bit. Get your act together!"

"Life has to be lived. Don't take pills and fall asleep in the armchair."

"Scientists and inventors should try to create something to help the workers rather than inventing cannons and machines that kill and destroy."

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