As you may know, we think that if we make it to the top of Kili, Ma will be the first Grandma to do it in a team with her child and grandchild. We’re not sure whether we will be allowed to apply for a Guinness World Record as the criteria now seem to say that they only authenticate records that can be broken; obviously a “first to…” is not a breakable record. We are pretty confident that we’ll be the youngest three generation climb too (we can only find two previous successful three generation climbs – all male apart from one granddaughter, and older than us in both cases)., so maybe we’ll be allowed that record instead. I’ll be contacting them soon to find out whether either is possible!
Bizarrely I already have a Guinness World Record certificate from when I was part of “the most number of people simultaneously bird calling” at a Twitter conference (see what they did there?!) about 4 years ago. It seem to have been broken many times since, so I need to regain my crown!!!
In order to put forward a confident proposal to the folk at GWR I’ve been doing quite a lot of Googling to see whether I can find any other evidence of three generational climbs / grannies climbing Kili. On a recent investigation I found the following article and just thought it was suitably mad to be part of our blog! Can you believe that this wonderful old lady sat down to write a marvelously fabricated obituary, thought, “What is the most daft thing I could do”, and decided it was to pretend she’d been climbing Mt Kilimanjaro? With her daughter no less!! She also purported to have taken her dog and cat with her – rather than her grandson – but you get the picture.
And the very best thing? The paper printed it; she pulled off her subterfuge right at the last. Well done Norma – we salute you!
Here’s link to the obituary that was printed it The Connecticut Post.
And here is the debunking article from the next week!
