Big Day for UK’s Oldest Man
THE bunting was out in a Chorley nursing home yesterday as Britain’s oldest man celebrated his THIRTY SEVEN THOUSANDTH birthday.
Albert Olton, who was born in Buckshaw in 34,982 BC, has spent practically all of his life in the small Lancashire village. And he took the milestone of beginning his 38th millennium in his stride, telling reporters he still felt ‘fit as a fiddle.’
Although Albert’s birth pre-dates agriculture, the domestication of animals and all but the most rudimentary forms of civilisation, he remains full of life and only entered the Quiet Sands nursing home at the age of 36,999 after suffering a fall last winter.
“I’m still in pretty good health,” Albert told his local paper the Chorley Prepuce. “I get the odd twinge off an arrow wound I got at the Battle of Crécy, but that’s about it.”
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Throughout his long life, Albert has had a variety of careers, including spells as a woolly mammoth hunter, cave painter, flint arrowhead maker, Neanderthal, spice merchant and tin miner. And it is only in the last couple of centuries that he has finally thought about taking retirement. “There was no such thing as the welfare state when I was a lad, or for thousands of years after,” he said.
After retiring from his job in a Victorian dip tallow factory in 1856, Albert took things easy for 110 years, playing bowls and pottering about on his allotment. But he quickly got bored and in 1966 started working part time as a lollipop man, a position which he kept up until well after his 36,998th birthday in 2015.
But the spritely tridecaseptokilogenarian didn’t crack open open the champagne to mark his special day, because he has been practically teetotal all his life. “Alcohol wasn’t invented until Neolithic times, when I was in my early twenty-eight thousands, so I never really got a taste for it,” he told reporters. “I had a pint of rudimentary fermented ale at the opening ceremony for Stonehenge, but I didn’t really like the taste. Apart from a small sherry to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking in 1900, that was about it.”
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Albert celebrated the big day with a few of his three-and-a-half million living descendants. He told the paper: “It’s always nice to get together with my great times eighteen hundred-and-fifty grandkids and have a bit of a knees-up.”
“I just hope they don’t decide to give me the bumps,” he quipped. “At a rate of one bump every two seconds, it would take more than twenty hours.”
Also joining in the festivities was Albert’s wife of 36,873 years, Ada. Mrs Olton still remembers the first time she set eyes on her husband like it was yesterday. “It was a village feast to celebrate the hunting of an auroch, a sort of Upper Palaeolithic wild bison,” she said. “I saw Albert at the other side of the cave and that was it for me. It was love at first sight.”
“Like all couples who’ve been together for more than thirty-six millennia, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I wouldn’t change Albert for the world,” said Ada, 36,996, who works three mornings a week at the Chorley branch of B&Q.