This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
Anyway apart from election fever, which is giving me a headache, I am feeling a spring in my step and I just love watching all the animals on our little eyot (river island) making their nests in preparation for this year’s batch of young. Having just spent the weekend with my four children, which was invigorating and exhausting in equal measures, I cannot imagine having a child a year. However I was reading the newspaper and saw the story about the oldest set of siblings; a family of 12 siblings has set the record for the world’s oldest – with a total age of 1,019 years and 336 days.
The seven Tweed brothers and five sisters made history after months of Guinness World Records checks. The siblings are aged between 76 and 95 and between them have 33 grandchildren, 59 great-grandchildren and 17 great-great-grandchildren. They are Elsie, 95, Reginald, 92, Robert, 91, Cynthia, 89, Ralph, 87, Noel, 85, Eric, 83, Ronnie, 82, Malcolm, 81, Valerie, 79, Phyllis, 78, and Eunice 76.
There were 16 siblings but 4 have died. 8 of them still live in Coventry where they grew up and they all get together fairly regularly and all get on. The longest time their mother, Flo, was not pregnant was 23 months, however she did die aged 59 years which is probably the saddest fact as how she would have loved to have seen all those grandchildren.
Lack of heating, according to one of the siblings, seems to have been the clue to this large family so – turn the heating off if you want to re-ignite your sex life!
I will never complain again about the amount of washing and cooking I have to do when all my family are home as I will think about the enormous task that faced Flo each and every day bringing her family up. No labour-saving devices for Flo and Percy in those bleak days of the first half of the twentieth century. However there could be something in the saying, “many hands make light work”. I am amazed that when Flo and Percy climbed the stairs to bed they didn’t just collapse with sheer exhaustion. I am in total awe of this family.
Lack of electronic devices in the kitchen and laundry room may have made Flo’s life hard, but there has to be something said about lack of computers, mobile phones, iPads etc which take up so much time in our modern lives. My daughters have started to keep a financial diary just to log where their hard-earned salary goes each month. I would like to keep a digital diary about how much time I spend on my digital devices!
So it’s turn off the heating and all the digital devices and watch out Husband……!!