The world's oldest living person might just have pocketed all of the world's luck. Jose Aguinelo dos Santos walks without a stick, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, has no known health problems, and is still a childless bachelor. Oh, and his birth certificate shows him to have turned 126 last week.
The Brazilian man, whose parents were African slaves, was born on July 7, 1888, just two months after slavery was abolished in Brazil - the last country in the world to outlaw the trade, BBC News reported Tuesday. Known as Ze, he was apparently 26 when the First World War broke out, and already a pensioner at 65 when Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the British throne.
One of five children, Jose continued to live among hundreds of families in a slave compound in the town of Pedra Branca in the state of Ceara, northeast Brazil, even after being granted freedom, the Washington Post reported. After spending most of his life on a coffee plantation in the state of Sao Paulo, the bachelor now resides in the town of Bauru.
But here's what the 126-year-old bachelor enjoys doing: he likes to tell jokes and sing, hates having a bath, never misses his daily plate of rice and beans and remains absolutely healthy despite smoking a packet of cigarettes a day for the last 50 years.
However, Jose doesn't believe that a magic formula exists to live a longer life. "The truth is that you just keep getting older. You take each stage at a time. If I got to this age it's because I've lived a lot, that's all," he told Brazil's G1 website.
Mariana Silva, psychologist at the Vila Vicentina home, said Jose, who arrived at the home in 2001, has no health problems and is so lucid that he still amuses other residents by cracking one-liners, according to BBC News. "He's one of our most with-it residents," she said. "He doesn't have high cholesterol, diabetes or high blood pressure. The only medicine he takes are vitamins and a tablet to give him an appetite, which you can lose with old age."
"When he's on his own he likes to sing. None of us know the songs he sings. They're from a time no-one else remembers. He doesn't like to take a bath every day and it's sometimes impossible to get him to the shower. When he puts his foot down, that's it. No-one can get him in there," she added.
After living his entire life without any documents, Jose received his birth certificate last month when a team of experts researched his past and interviewed him about his earliest memories, during which he was able to describe the slave compound perfectly.
