Some People And/Or Things That Aren’t The Age You Think
The past is closer than you think.
So a fun thing I learned this week is that if you have a small leak, it’s possible to not notice it for literally years, and then one day a hole in your bath opens up like a space-time anomaly off Star Trek.
Anyway, I have had A Week, I am facing A Bill, and if you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber so that you get the full newsletter every Wednesday around 4pm, then rest assured I would be particularly grateful if you did it this week:
As ever if you want but can’t afford, please do just ask, I will say yes. Honestly.
Enough self-pity passing as sales pitch (or, possibly, sales pitch passing as self-pity). Here’s something paying subscribers got in September.
A few months ago, I was researching the history of air conditioning for a thing; I like dropping these hints about what I’m working on, even though nobody has thus far shown the slightest interest in trying to join the dots or even, come to that, noticed that I’m leaving any dots.1 Anyway! While doing so, I came across a 1998 New Yorker piece named “Before Air-Conditioning”, and written by a chap named Arthur Miller.
“That’s funny,” I thought, “shouldn’t they have clarified that it wasn’t the Arthur Miller? Surely people will get confused?” So I read the piece and looked up the author and it turned out the reason they didn’t do that is because it was the Arthur Miller, who was still alive and well and writing for the New Yorker at roughly the point when Peter Mandelson was limbering up to resign from the British government the first time round. Miller only died in 2005, at the impressive but not especially unusual age of 89.
I should obviously have known better – I literally studied the plays of Arthur Miller as an undergraduate; he was alive then, too, and I’d entirely failed to notice. But the reason I got confused is because I associate him with a different period entirely. Death of a Salesman dates from 1949; The Crucible dates from, and is to a large extent about, 1953, when McCarthyism was at its height. Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe, for Christ’s sake! Surely that guy couldn’t be working at a point when the Beastie Boys released Intergalactic? And yet, he definitely was. Indeed, his last play – with the thematically appropriate name Finishing the Picture – premiered in Chicago in October 2004 just four months before his death, an artefact of the same cultural era as the BBC’s Hotel Babylon and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me. Miller kept working til his final months – yet he will always be associated in the public, or at least my, mind, with a period an entire half century before.
I’m a sucker for stuff like this, the moments when our instinctive sense of how time works is just wrong. In the past, I’ve written about the surprising recency of the last pension widows (2020) left over from the US civil war (1861-5), and the last surviving grandchildren (2025!) of President John Tyler (1841-5).
So obviously, I posted about this. And the internet being what it is, I got literally dozens of responses, other examples of people and things that seem somehow out of time. I’ve selected, fact-checked and, in a few cases, slightly adjusted my favourites. (The names in brackets and italics are hattips.)
Bruce Forsythe was 16 months older than Anne Frank. (John Self.)
And sliced bread. (Chris.)
He first appeared on the BBC show named Come and Be Televised, broadcast in 1939, before the birth of even a single Beatle. (Brian Edwards.)
Judi Dench is older than three quarters of Mount Rushmore; George Washington had been completed five months earlier than she had. (Paul Haine.)
Dmitri Shostakovich not only watched Jesus Christ Superstar, he said he wished he’d composed it, too – although to be fair, we only have Andrew Lloyd Webber’s word for at least part of that. (Chris Hutchings.)
He also could have enjoyed Abba singing Waterloo at Eurovision, though we cannot be certain that he did. (Jason Hazeley.)
Alexander Kerensky, who led the provisional government that ran Russia for four months between the two revolutions of 1917, lived long enough that he could have heard the Beatles’ Back in the USSR before he died in 1970. (Andrew Mueller.)
Rudolf Hess could have turned on the radio to hear Respectable by Mel & Kim. (Lewis Baston.)
Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, lived long enough to see nightmarish anti-nuclear war movie Threads and possibly also regret the lack of nukes in both Iraq wars: he lasted til September 2003. (Broken banker.)
Margaret Thatcher, David Attenborough and the late Queen could all have been in the same year at school – the same, oddly enough, as Marilyn Monroe. (John Oxley.)
Joe Biden is a week older than Jimi Hendrix. (Richard Cubitt.)
Richard also posted this photo of Paramount’s biggest stars of 1987, which features both Jimmy Stewart (who made his first film in 1934) and Tom Cruise (still headlining films today). The latter is standing next to DeForest Kelley, who played Star Trek’s Dr McCoy, which isn’t so much temporarily confusing as spatially so.
Hugh Hefner’s last wife was younger when Schindler’s List came out than he was when the real Schindler wrote his actual list. He was 18 in 1944; she was 7 in 1993. That was not when they got married, to be clear, that’d be disgusting. No, when they got married he was 86, she 26. (Chris McKeon.)
Bertrand Russell lived from 1872 to 1970 – which means his life overlaps with those of both Andy Burnham and Emperor Napoleon III. (Mark.)
Pablo Picasso, meanwhile, overlapped with both Charles Darwin and Eminem. (Ben O’Connell.)
Isaac Asimov lived long enough to watch that episode of Neighbours when Bouncer the dog had a dream. (Chris Webb.)
Orson Welles’ last acting work was his posthumous appearance in 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie. “It wasn’t until 1985 that Orson Welles finally fulfilled his true destiny by playing the planet-gobbling Unicron,” explains the Transformers wiki. (Michael Mills.)
Muriel Spark was born in 1918. She wrote a regular diary for Slate when it launched in 1996. (Anthony Dhanendran.)
My favourite “Oh shit she’s still alive?” person for literally decades was Vera Lynn, who had a war time hit with We’ll Meet Again in 1939, aged 22. She died in June 2020 – meaning it’s possible she had strong views about both Boris Johnson’s handling of covid and the final season of Game of Thrones. (No hat tip, this one’s my own.)
The first prepackaged sandwich only arrived in Britain a few months before I did, in early 1980.
Clare Hollingworth, who broke the news of the Nazi invasion of Poland, lived long enough to mourn Harambe. (Citizen Meh.)
Rosa Parks lived until 2005, meaning she could have seen Christopher Eccleston play Doctor Who and two different Shrek films. (Sleepy Waffles, which I assume is their real name.)
This one from Dave Matthews (not that one) is a truly terrible joke, but I respect it too much not to include:
“Tennessee Williams died in 1983, so he was alive at the same time as Venus and Serena – the other tennis-y Williams.”
Brad Pitt is older than Nigel Farage. (Sam Ess.)
And finally, courtesy of Jak, here’s a 1956 clip from the US quiz show I’ve Got A Secret, in which contestants have to guess what the secret is. The secret was that he was the last living eyewitness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, 91 years earlier. He’d been five years old.
The past is closer than we think.
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