The Guardian

Es Migjorn, Menorca:

The oldest man in the world is standing up in his front room, slightly bent over and sagging at the knees, dressed in his winter best. Joan Riudavets, 114 years old, is wearing a flat cap and tie, his multiple layers of jerseys topped with a blue Lacoste cardigan. Joan believes guests should get the warmest possible welcome. And that, whatever the doctor says, means standing up and shaking hands. “I’m fine,” he says in Spanish, politely waving away the offer of an arm.

His daughter, Paca, arrives back from the shop in Es Migjorn, the village on the island of Menorca where Joan has lived, in the same street, since he was born. “He is meant to stay sitting down when I go out. He does not always obey,” she apologises. Joan, however, is sticking to one of the few bits of advice he gives those who seek the secret of his longevity: “Keep moving, keep going forward.” He insists, in fact, that he does not feel old enough to be breaking records. “They say I am the grandfather of the world,” he chuckles. “I could not really believe it when they told me. My body does not hurt me at all. I am 114 years old but I still do not know what a headache feels like. Look! My pulse is steady. I can still hold a pen and write perfectly well.”

He chats animatedly, gesticulating and clenching his hands. His words get gargled on the way up his throat, and can be difficult to capture. From time to time he loses the thread of conversation, but he is, mostly, on the ball. Joan made it into the record books last September, when Yukichi Chuganji, of Japan, died at the age of 114 years and 139 days. His contemporaries, also born in 1889, included Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler. The Eiffel Tower was finished the same year, Queen Victoria sat on the British throne and Jack the Ripper was still on the prowl.

His recipe for lasting so long has little to do with diets or exercise routines and lots to do with the inner self. “Live calmly and treat other people well,” he advises as we tuck into glasses of sweet, strong muscatel wine and Paca’s pastisets, doughy, home-made biscuits. He has always drunk a bit, like this, but only in moderation. He gave up smoking in 1922, when he was 33. “I was never one of those who smoked all the time anyway.”

He may not consider it important, but Joan is a walking advertisement for the Mediterranean diet. “I eat anything,” he says. “Chickpeas and beans, fruit and vegetables, meat and fish. But, whatever it is, I like it well cooked.” Joan would like to have been a football player. But, like so many other things, the game had not been invented when he was born. Or, rather, it had not come to Menorca. He was 12 when Real Madrid was founded. “Es Migjorn was the first place in Menorca to include football in its summer fiestas,” he recalls proudly. “But that was in the mid-1920s.” Joan was in his mid-30s.

Much of what we take for granted had not been invented when Joan was born. Radio, commercially produced cars, aeroplanes, even zips, had not made it off the drawing board, let alone to a remote Mediterranean island. He remembers the island’s first car. “It went too fast and crashed, turned right over,” he laughs. Electricity, however, remains his choice for the greatest invention introduced to Es Migjorn during his life. “I had read about it and seen it in Menorca’s capital, in Mahon. But that really changed everything,” he said. It also provided him with a new form of entertainment — switching the neighbours’ supply off.

Joan never learned to drive, but was the proud owner of a bicycle. On an island the size of Menorca, only 50 km long, that is all you need. “I always liked movement,” he explains, his arms jigging backwards and forwards. “I loved cycling and I liked swimming and dancing too. I liked dancing the fandango best.” His greatest love of all, though, has been music. “I learned to play guitar and the violin when I was young. It was my best pastime. When there was no work to be done, that was what I liked doing.”

He started working in the family’s shoe-making workshop as a child and retired in the 1950s. In those days, he explained, you did what your father told you. “We never lacked work. We have been very fortunate,” he says. He still remembers half a dozen men from the village being called up to go to the war in Cuba in 1898 — just as Britain was about to embark on the second Boer war. Spain lost that one, and the last of its American colonies. “Some never came back. And those who did were ill for the rest of their lives,’’ he said. “The family of one of them spent six years in mourning. And then he suddenly reappeared. Maybe he did not know how to write.”

Joan was one of the few villagers who learned to write. He would like to have studied more and become a doctor or teacher. “I liked school,” he said. “But I had to work with my father.” He was an obedient son. “One reason I learned to read was that I woke up one morning and there was a book in my room. I took that as a sign from my father that he wanted me to learn.”

His biggest regret, even now, is that he never met his mother. She died 15 days after he was born, aged 24. There was no photograph of her. “I have always regretted that, and more so as time goes by,” he says. The Riudavets are unusually long-lived. Pere, a brother, lives a few doors down the same street. He is a mere stripling at 103. “He’s stone deaf,” explains Paca. “But he could probably run down the street if he wanted to.” The youngest brother lives in Mahon. At 98, he hardly counts as old by family standards.

Scientists from Boston have visited with their syringes, looking for genetic secrets to the Riudavets’ longevity, though none has come to a conclusion. The Guinness Book of Records keeps files on some 40 registered supercentenarians, aged over 110. The names of record-holders, and those in pursuit, are constantly being renewed.

When Joan became the world’s oldest man in September, he was still only its fourth oldest person — a record traditionally held by a woman. But, within a few weeks, the Japanese winter had killed off both 116-year-old Kamato Hongo and 114-year-old Mitoyo Kowate. That left only Charlotte Benkner from Ohio, just 25 days older than Joan, as the world’s oldest person; then she, too, died.

Joan has become something of a celebrity, even a tourist attraction. His favourite visit, though, was from the local schoolchildren. “They asked me what I did all day. I told them I was a layabout, but that they should study.” He was not joking. Joan spends 15-hour stretches in bed most nights. He likes lying there, going through his memories. “It’s where I feel best,” he says.

Doing the right thing, or behaving properly, have been lifelong concerns. “I have always to tried to think well of people. I have never lied, or at least not with intent,” he says. Even now, as death approaches, his biggest worry is that everybody should be “satisfied” with him. “I think a lot about the things I should do well so I can leave my family happy and satisfied. I do not want them to be discontent with me,” he says. I wonder what those scientists will find in his genes. Perhaps they are looking in the wrong place. Joan’s secret, I suspect, lies in the heart.