When living memory clears the mists of time My new ambition is to live to 100 years of age so I can qualify to be a "human wormhole" - that is, somebody whose historical connections take us back through time to a point beyond average living memory. Besse Berry Cooper of Tennessee was something of a "wormhole": she died this week, aged 116 (after a full breakfast and having just had her hair done), the oldest person in the world. Besse graduated as a schoolteacher in 1916, and quit work, when she became a mother, in 1929. What living memory Besse represented! Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert's mamma, must also count among this biological elite - she died, hale and hearty almost to the end, at 103, still giving her son a piece of her mind by telephone up to three times a week. Dame Elisabeth was a debutante in 1927, in the full flush of that hectic jazz age, now the stuff of legend. Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, was another candidate for wormhole status, and died this week at 104 - he would have had clear memories of South America before the First World War. Helen John Houghton, the first woman to train a Classic winner in 1956, surely merits inclusion: she died at 102. She grew up in a world where girls might still be educated entirely at home by governesses (and where female trainers were resolutely excluded from the Jockey Club). Each time I read about the passing of such a human wormhole, I wish I could have met them and asked about the link with the past. The pity of it is that I didn't think of this a bit sooner: if I had started talking to older people in the Sixties, for example, I could have met plenty who remembered the Victorian age. My mother and my aunts were all Edwardians and their memories went vividly back to the early 20th century. But when I was young, I wasn't the least bit interested in the memories of older people. Boring! It was the present and the future that mattered, not the tiresome old-fashioned past. It was only as I crossed the rubicon of my mid-fifties that it dawned on me that tracing back human recollection is fascinating. Why hadn't I shown any interest in the older generations" reminiscences of the Twenties and Thirties? These were fascinating decades. This, it seems, is a common regret. There was a survey recently about the things that people most regret in their senior years, and one of the leading sources of repining is not having asked older generations about old memories. The awful irony is that by the time you turn towards this thread of human continuity, the older generation is mostly gone. It only occurred to me in late middle-age that I could - should the Almighty preserve me - be a worthy candidate for human wormhole status myself. My father was born in 1877 - I have his passport in front of me - and, as a young child, was patted on the head by Charles Stewart Parnell; he once saw Oscar Wilde in the flesh; and before the First World War, he was presented to the great ballet dancer Anna Pavlova. He studied in Syria in the 1890s, when, he told my mother, it was very heaven. This memory was transmitted to me, but alas, I never did get to ask the elders of the tribe for more details. Still, I am steadily progressing towards wormhole status, since my reach already stretches across three centuries - from the 1870s to 2012. Happily, I think that younger people today are more aware of the chain of links over the generations - partly because so many archives have now gone online and TV programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? have so skilfully illuminated the living element of past lives. It is taken seriously. By contrast, a 1956 American TV game show interviewed an elderly chap, Samuel J Seymour, who had witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 - a tragedy that was treated as a facetious guessing game. I don't think that would happen today: Mr Seymour would be able to deliver his human wormhole memory without a tittering audience.