We all are, indeed, the survey of settled foreigners carried out in 2006 analysed questionnaires from a random sample of over 500 people (over 300 of whom lived in and around Fethiye) and 70% of them were over 50 – with the oldest respondent being no less than 86.  The village wing of Fethiye Times is well into this ‘elder’ age group and today we would Iike to introduce you to a blog written from Portland, Maine by a woman called Ronni Bennett.  Ronni, currently 66, had a long career in the media in New York, was involved with on-line news services from their inception and finding herself unemployed, and seemingly unemployable, four years ago started to write ‘Time Goes By’ (TGB) her award-winning blog which, as its subtitle says so well, is all about “what it’s really like to get old”.  You can read the blog here and if you’d like to know more about Ronni and the background to the blog, clock in the ‘About’ button in the top lefthand corner.

Ronni also has a very comprehensive list of blog sites written by elders, some of them in the UK, and you can spend days exploring this virtual world by clicking on the links in the sidebars.

Ronni now has a global community of avid readers who log on to TGB daily to see what the latest post contains – in Fethiye the update appears early afternoon.  Last year she started a companion site to showcase some of the stories sent in by readers.  As we all know anyone over 50 has lots of stories to tell.  The ‘Elder Storytelling Place’ can be reached here.  Today (well yesterday on the other side of the Atlantic) the featured story is written by a resident of Fethiye and tells of a very entertaining night out in Istanbul in 1970.  So go and read it – and we hope some of you will be bookmarking both these sites.