As we exit January we took a glimpse of the future by examining two Brits who are clearly aiming to make it big in the years to come.
Firstly we reported on a toddler who’s become Britain’s youngest Mensa member after smashing an IQ test and shocking his parents.
Teddy Hobbs, 3 from Portishead, Somerset can read fluently and count to 100 in seven different languages, including Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, and Welsh.
Don’t you just hate a “know it all?”
What’s more he has little interest in games or TV, preferring instead a relaxing word search, or for real fun to sit down and recite his times tables; apparently on one occasion getting so excited over fractions that he gave himself a nosebleed!
Teddy’s genius does come with some other issues as his mother, Beth explained, her friends can say ‘oh should we have some c-a-k-e’ and their kids won’t know what they’re saying, but not so Teddy who will immediately spell it out and want some.
And his parents are worried that his abilities might result in his developing a kind of ‘superiority complex’, given that he’ll look at friends struggling to read and say ‘how come they can’t do that’ when he can.
He is due to start school in September but has probably already outgrown the syllabus.
Sorry to say but he sounds like a real pain!
But perhaps that remark was a little unkind so I wish his parents well in trying to to bring him up as a well balanced individual.
Anyway, moving on we reported on 17-year old Mack Rutherford who recently became the youngest person to make a solo circumnavigation of the world in an aeroplane, in the process breaking the record held by his sister, Zara, just a month earlier.
In fact his flight was made in a microlight, thereby breaking another record.
The previous holder of the age record was fellow Briton Travis Ludlow, who was 18 when he circumnavigated the earth a year earlier.
Mack’s flight started and ended in Bulgaria being the location of his sponsors ICDSoft, who loaned him the aircraft, a Shark Aero, the world’s fastest ultralight plane, capable of speeds up to 300 kilometres per hour.
During the course of his flight which took him through 52 countries in 5 continents, he was plagued by monsoons, sandstorms, and extreme heat with permits, red tape and the like contributing to enforced alterations to the scheduled route or delays.
Mack hopes that his success will encourage others to follow their dreams, saying
“Just follow your dreams, no matter how old you are — work hard and move forward to achieve your goals.”
But for Mack now it’s catch up time, back to school.
I think it’s fair to say that it’s almost certainly too late for me to achieve any kind of stardom, however I do hope to have your company again tomorrow,
Scott
