Blogger, 95, becomes cyber celebrity
Updated: 2007-11-07 23:01
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Web-blogger Maria Amelia Lopez shows the home page of her blog on a laptop screen in Sanxenxo October 5, 2007. At the age of 95 Lopez has surprised herself by a sudden conversion from Web-illiterate to cybercelebrity. [Agencies] |
"I was always talkative, but now I feel more wanted, embraced, because so may people write to me," said Lopez.
On her blog she makes occasional references to her youthful good looks ("Ah, how pretty I was, and how little I realised it"), but today she has white hair and walks with a stick.
"Look at what I was," she wrote in one entry, beneath a photograph of herself from 60 or 70 years ago, "And look at what I am, at what I have become. My eyes aren't pretty, nor my mouth, or anything, not my body. Age disfigures everything."
"The Internet has given me life," she told Reuters, describing how she receives messages from places as diverse as Brazil, Russia and Japan.
Lopez has called herself as "the world's oldest blogger," although a quick Google search reveals several pretenders to the title, including 108-year-old Australian Olive Riley, who can be found at www.allaboutolive.com.au/.
CIVIL WAR MEMORIES
Due partly to cataracts which mean she can't see screens well, Lopez is assisted in her blogging by her grandson, Daniel, who takes her dictation.
Many of her stories deal with a long life, which started happily and then had to steer through Spain's vicious Civil War and the long years of dictatorship by General Francisco Franco which followed.
"I had a very happy youth," she wrote, describing expeditions to bullfights and fun times with her cousins.
"Young men were different back then. They brought us flowers, gardenias, violets, chocolates. Not like the foul-mouthed bunch today."
It was one of these polite young men who told her of the outbreak of Civil War in 1936.
"He had left-wing ideas .... the boy said to me 'Maria Amelia, this is a revolution!' And I began to hear shooting," Lopez blogged, describing how later that day her father was chased out of his job at a customs office by Franco's men.
Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has written to congratulate Lopez on her blog and she recommends other seniors to take up blogging.
But it's not all easy.
"I'm going to die before I get broadband," read one recent, sad entry.
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