Photo : View from tower of St Fidelis Church looking west. The kids are playing in the yard and I can pick out the boys lavatories.

Today I received an email from a stranger.

Before you start on bragging rights about the number of times per day some total stranger sends you time sensitive messages with details of incredible fortunes just awaiting, let me tell you this was the genuine article. The writer wondered if I remembered the words of a hymn that was sung in primary schools a long long time when the world (including myself) was young.

I probably last sang that particular hymn at St Fidelis in 1955 but the human brain is a curious thing and I recalled it instantly.

O little Babe of Bethlehem! The Southern Cross shines down
As once a Star shone glorious above an Eastern town

The hearts of Bethlehem are cold, the streets are hushed with snow
The doors are barred, there is no room, dear Lord, where wilt thou go?

Oh come sweet Jesus come to us! Australia’s sun is warm,
And here are loving hearts enough to shield thee from the storm

How my little heart swelled as I sang Australia’s sun is warm. Crikey, it’s been a long time since I felt like that.

I wish I could remember other more relevant things like childrens’ birthdays, PIN numbers and where I last put my slippers but, hey, you can’t have everything. In any case it was nice to know that someone else remembers the ditty.

A German schoolboy is thanking his lucky stars - after surviving being hit by a meteorite.

Poor little chap! Young Gerrit Blank, 14, was innocently on his way to school when he spotted a massive fireball in the heavens - what’s more it was heading straight at him!

“At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand,” he said. “Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.”

The white-hot meteorite hit the ground so hard it left a foot wide crater in the tarmac and a three-inch long scar on Gerrit’s hand where

Luckily it was only the size of a pea!

More on Meteorites

She billed herself as the “world’s oldest blogger” and gained a global following online.

Maria Amelia Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren, used a mix of humour and nostalgia to recall life during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco and give her take on modern life.

“Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog,” she wrote on her first post on amis95.blogspot.com on December 23, 2006.

Her blog quickly soared in popularity with more than 1.5 million hits, and it earned Lopez a meeting with Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who she openly supported.

In summer, Lopez would write from her seaside home in Muxia in northwestern Spain, where she was born in 1911; and from the Galician farmhouse where she lived with her grandson Daniel during the rest of the year.

Her posts touched on personal health problems, from trips to the doctor to bouts of dizziness, to her opinion on current events; from the violence of the Basque separatists to Iran’s nuclear pretensions.

She blogged sporadically - sometimes once a week, sometimes daily - with the aid of her grandson because cataracts impaired her vision.

In recent months Lopez was increasingly posting video messages on her blog instead of written texts.

In one of her last posts made in February, she enthused about how the “internet amazes me more and more” after her grandson Daniel introduced her to the social networking site Facebook.

She promptly set up a group on Facebook to defend old people’s rights.

“One day soon I am going to die. All I am really scared of is losing my mind. In the meantime, I’ll carry on“.

Vale Maria Amelia