The 91-year-old greeted his new, corona-repelling superpowers by complaining about his lunch and asking Piers Morgan who he was – and it was a delight to see
Along with humanity, the news channel CNN got incredibly lucky on the world’s first day of the Covid vaccine: loitering outside Guy’s hospital in central London, a reporter met Martin Kenyon, 91 years old, freshly minted with corona-repelling superpowers (pending the second dose, etc), extraordinarily charming.
Was it the incidental, quotidian detail (he’d had trouble parking, and had a nasty lunch); the careful precision of his language (“I have a family; it consists of daughters and grandchildren); the steadfast refusal to emote (“I don’t feel about it at all”) in the face of what was, in honesty, an overpoweringly emotional moment (“I hope I’m not going to have the bloody bug now”)? Who knows, it could have been the way he pronounced off “orf”, and made the whole segment sound like a how-to video for a spy in the first world war to infiltrate the British officer class. Or perhaps it was his steadfast intention to stay alive on the grounds that, once you’ve done that for 91 years, ceasing to do so would be pointless.
