The Hindu : Front Page : Senior blogger from Spain is a big hit

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 02, 2007
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Senior blogger from Spain is a big hit

Giles Tremlett

Thanks to grandson, this great-grandmother has eager fans on the Net across the world

Madrid: 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 millions of younger Internet chroniclers can only dream of.

Ms. Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages strange and impossible for her to understand.

“My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxia (A Coruna - Spain) on December the 23rd of 1911,” was 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 a 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 TV.

“I blame the children, who don’t want to help them,” she said on Friday 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.

Ms. 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. She likes to read online newspapers, for which she boosts the font size, and stay up-to-date with medical and scientific advances.

The blog was a gift from Daniel, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace. He has become her chief assistant: Ms. 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 TV interviews, with YouTube links given on her blog, have spread her name beyond the Spanish-speaking world. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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