‘When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age’ – Victor Hugo
On Sunday 7th July 2013 I was lucky enough to experience something that I may never get to experience for the rest of my life, I helped a remarkable lady celebrate her 100th Birthday.
For a child of the eighties it’s hard enough to believe living in a world without a home computer or a mobile phone (although if i think hard enough i can just about remember) but to imagine living in a world that my husband’s grandmother was born into is truly mind blowing. Below, is a list of just some of the historical events that have taken place since she was born:
1913 – Ford introduces the world’s first moving assembly line
1914 – Beginning of WWI
1918 – Woman allowed to vote in the UK
1921 – Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel prize in physics
1922 – Mussolini’s march on Rome
1927 – Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris
1928 – Premiere of Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie
1929 – Wall Street Crash ‘Black Thursday’
1933 – Inauguration of Hitler
1939 – Beginning of WWII
1941 – Attack on Pearl Harbour
1945 – Atomic bombing of Hiroshima
1950 – Korean war
1954 – First colour television broadcast
1955 – Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus
1963 – Assassination of John F Kennedy
1969 – First man on the moon
1974 – Watergate Scandal
1980 – John Lennon assassinated
1981 – Launch of MTV
1984 – Live Aid
1986 – Chernobyl Disaster
1989 – Fall of the Berlin Wall
1992 – Introduction of the World Wide Web
1998 – Lewinsky scandal
2000 – the Millennium
2001 – September 11 attacks
2002 – Euro notes are issued in Europe
2009 – Inauguration of Barack Obama
I can’t imagine that there will be another century that will show so many leaps forward, not in the western world at least. It’s hard to imagine that if i were lucky enough to live until i was 100, i would be able to list the same extent of changes in the world.
I asked Dave’s Gran on her 100th Birthday, as she posed proudly with her telegram from Her Majesty the Queen, what the secret to living to 100 was and she said ‘I don’t smoke and i don’t drink’ ‘What about Baileys?’ Dave quizzed. Gran stopped and thought for a second ‘I don’t smoke and I only drink Baileys’ truly a woman after my own heart. And a woman who is greatly, greatly missed.
