Nun turns 118 with port-and-choc cocktail

MARSEILLE: A French nun who recently celebrated her 118th birthday with her traditional portand-chocolate cocktail is now the world’s oldest known person, following the death announced yesterday of a Japanese woman one year her senior.

Lucile Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, when World War I was still a decade away.

She now lives at a nursing home in Toulon along the Mediterranean coast, beginning every day with breakfast and then a morning mass, though her eyes can no longer see.

Previously the person deemed the world’s oldest by the International Database on Longevity was Kane Tanaka, whose death in Japan on April 19 was announced yesterday.

Born on January 2, 1903 – the year of the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flight of their motordriven airplane – Tanaka died of old age in Fukuoka city, western Japan.

During her life, she had been partial to chocolate and fizzy drinks.