Tai Chi the latest challenge for active Christina as she turns 102

TAI CHI enthusiast Christina Vair will celebrate her 102nd birthday on Monday.

APPROACHING the grand old age of 102, Christina Vair puts her longevity down to keeping herself active all her life – and has recently taken up Tai Chi.

Born in Dalgety Avenue in May 1906, she moved to Duddingston Village and went to Portobello Higher Grade School.

Her father died shortly after she was born and her mother Catheryn Scheape remarried, to John Smith.

She speaks fondly of her early days in Duddingston Village playing with her sisters Barbara and Margaret outside the Sheep Heid pub, where she was friendly with the owner's daughter.

"I was very good with the skipping rope, except for when it was wet outside and it got so slippery," she says.

"I remember a great pear tree near where I lived, and one day I got all excited and started climbing up. But I then realised I couldn't get back down and some friends had to rescue me."

She left school in 1922 at the age of 16 and found a job as a clerical assistant for Andrew Whyte & Sons, a paper merchants and stationers, and in 1934 she married car salesman James Vair.

A few years later she gave birth to a Kathryn, the couple's only daughter.

During the Second World War Christina worked in the Capital offices of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute in George Street.

After the war her husband was demobbed from the Army and Christina returned to her previous job, eventually being promoted to head clerkess.

Asked her secret to a long life, she praised her late husband.

"I had a wonderful husband," she said. "We got on so well together, life was so smooth. Of course we had our arguments, but we just fitted so well."

Throughout her life she has always made a point of staying active, both physically and mentally.

In recent years she has discovered the ancient martial art of Tai Chi, which she practices every second week.

And she has recently told staff at the care home where she now lives of her ambition to skydive.

Paul Wilson, of Drummond Grange Care Home in Lasswade, where Christina lives, said: "She says she'll jump out a plane if I do it too, but I told her I'm far too scared for that.

"The thing is she's serious. She's a wonderful woman who is very aware and mobile for her age."

Christina has outlived both her siblings, her husband and her daughter Kathryn.