As if it wasn't reward enough on Tuesday to just be visiting and paying respects to Mrs Ellen Heath on her 105th birthday there was an unexpected bonus. At Southern Cross Care in Garran she gave this reporter and Southern Cross Care's Peter Stevenson a song recital.
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Having just declared to us her fondness for music she gave us proof of it by singing us word-perfect and tune-perfect renditions of The Mountains of Mourne and of You Are My Heart's Delight. Perhaps it is a measure of my own advancing age that I know these songs backwards. As a child I used to play Josef Locke's 78 r.p.m. recording of You Are My Heart's Delight on a wind-up gramophone. But this means that I am qualified to testify, hand on heart, that on Tuesday Mrs Heath sang the songs, words and melodies, unfalteringly and perfectly.
It is almost certain that Ellen Heath, born in London on 7 July 1910, the sole child of Albert and Bridget Malone, is the most senior of senior Canberrans. And with yesterday's birthday she graduated from being a mere centenarian to becoming by one authority's definition a semi-super centenarian.
It is reported that Dr John McCormack, a specialist in health and geriatrics at La Trobe University in Melbourne and an authority on Australia's centenarians, arranges centenarians into three categories. There are centenarians - 100 to 104. Semi-super centenarians - 105 to 109. Then there are super centenarians of 110 and more summers.
Today there may be about 4000 centenarians in Australia. Newly born Australians' chances of living to 100 and beyond get better all the time and one estimate imagines that by 2030 we may be blessed with 6300 centenarians.
What will the most intellectually nimble of them be singing and reciting in 2030? On Tuesday, and after singing us The Mountains of Mourne Mrs Heath recited to us, again unfalteringly and with dramatic feeling, a quite long poem. It was the uplifting saga of how a heroic white rabbit rescues a poor fairy who has tumbled down a hole.
"I remember that from school," Mrs Heath reminisced, and we agreed that, yes, it's funny how things learned by heart when young seem to fix themselves in the mind.
We asked Mrs Heath the usual trite questions media hacks always do ask the old, looking for some secret of their longevity. Very important props of her very long life seem to have been and continue to be a love of all kinds of music and of singing. She has been a stalwart of the Garran home's drama group and choir. Religion, too, has always been fun for her. She used to be a joyous churchgoer and now looks forward to the services held at Garran on Wednesdays and Sundays. She joins in and sings the hymns and probably knows the words of all of them without any need of the hymn book.
Even though we do have a relative abundance of centenarians now Mrs Heath's grand age is still a mind-boggler. Here we are today, immersed in commemorations of that ancient horror the Great War of 1914-1918, but when Ellen Heath was born that horror was still unimaginably distant.
We were a little concerned on Tuesday with being a nuisance but in fact Mrs Heath, her chair in the home gaily decorated with a birthday helium balloon of royal purple, seemed set to enjoy a day of special attentions. The semi-super centenarian seemed to enjoy singing to us, a birthday audience, almost as much as we enjoyed being sung to by her.
Mrs Heath hasn't been staying up to watch Canberra's bling-bedecked Nick Kyrgios playing and misbehaving at Wimbledon. But some of this column's readers have and have been moved to send us the Nick Kyrgios limericks we invited. Kyrgios is a fiendishly difficult word to find a rhyme for but some of you have risen ingeniously to that challenge. The inventive Roger Ley opines:
There's something innately mysteryrgios
About Canberra's Nicholas Kyrgios.
First some on-court burlesque
That's quite McEnroe-esque
Then he wins and it send us delyrgios.
Ursula Nixon of Bodalla grumbles that:
The public is getting quite sick
Of the standards displayed by young Nick.
What with swearing and bling,
Tennis not being his thing,
It's time that he grew up real quick.
Our Nick is attracting all sorts of criticisms but we note that although the usual fogeys have come out to complain about the noises women players make at Wimbledon, there's no criticism of Kyrgios' manly bellows of exertion.
What fogeys really hate about women giving war cries when they play is that fogeys sexistly expect women tennis players to be decorative, to be seen but not heard. The fogeys don't notice that the men's noises are often more window-rattlingly loud.
A courtside veteran, I have always found these women's "war cries" a refreshing expression of women's liberation. I've often found them erotic, too; but perhaps that's just me.
On Monday our Nick chose to play some of the game's most difficult shots (including drop shots and especially drop volleys), and played them with flair and aplomb.
It is time for the ye olde absurd scoring system to be reformed to encourage and reward artistry. Why not imitate, for tennis, the way judges at diving events take into account the degrees of difficulty a diver dares to risk? Applied to tennis this would encourage the Goliaths of the game (like Nick) to more and more indulge their sensitive, artistic inner Davids.
