Friday, August 22, 2008

Life and times of a 95-year-old blogger

She Is Billed as the world's oldest blogger. At 95 years old and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard Maria Amelia Lopez has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger Internet chroniclers can only dream of.

Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grand children just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

"My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxia [A Coruna - Spain] on December the 23rd of1911," 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 out bursts of left-wing 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 nonage narian'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 Muxia, in the rugged northwestern corner of Spain, where she stays during the summer. "Internet has given me a new lease of life, but I don't see any old people's homes offering their residents Internet," she said.

Lopez, as the recent pictures of her shaking maracas in a Brazilian hotel prove, lives as far as you can get from the "do-nothing and wait-to-die" culture that she regularly lambasts.

Her grandson Daniel, with whom she lives, taught her to navigate the Internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. The blog was a gift from Daniel, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace. He has become her chief assistant: Lopez navigates with the mouse while he types in the words she dictates.

"Now so many people write to me that I can't hope to reply to them all, though I want to," she explained. "My grandson complains that he has to work as well, he can't spend all his time typing."

Much of her traffic comes from Spain and Latin America, but newspaper and television interviews, with YouTube links given on her blog, have spread her name beyond the Spanish speaking world. Lopez tells stories of her childhood and youth in Galicais. She recalls, too, the terrors of the Spanish civil war, and how her brother was sent to the front aged just 16 and came back with one leg shot off.

She was fined for refusing to show support for General Francisco Franco's National Movement."I must be the oldest socialist activisit in Spain," she said. "I've been socialist since I was 16, but my father would never let me actually join the party."

Her dislikes include daytime pillpopping, crude language and telephone companies that are slow to install broadband. Her main loves are poetry, politics, childhood memories, her native region of Galicia, a Jesus Christ who dislikes wealth and, she says, "the workers".

She has acquired readers in such far-flung places as Alaska, Australia, China and Nigeria.

Some people have suggested that she cash in on her popularity by getting paid-for advertisements placed on her blog, something she rejects. "I did this to amuse myself, not to start competing with people or making money," she said.

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