He's over 20, and in the recent unseasonable sunshine has taken to lying corpse-like on the pavement. In a feeble impersonation of Schrodinger's cat, he could be either alive or dead, and the only way to find out is to prod him, as he doesn't respond to shouting.
Last week, he took to doing his death act on top of a bin, and so it looked like he had just been thrown out with the rubbish. He got kidnapped by a concerned cat lover and carted off to the local Blue Cross, and we had to go and bail him out.
Taking each cat year as seven human years makes him over 140 - twice the human three-score-years-and-10 Biblical use-by date. I recently "celebrated" my 59th birthday, which is only around eight cat years and so a relative youth.
Being a statistician, I naturally wonder what proportion of my life has already flitted by, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) life-tables tell me that, assuming things stay the same as now, an average man my age can expect to live another 23 years - that is, until 82. Still way short of the cat, and suggesting I may have already had 72% of my life. Not encouraging.
But naturally I believe I am healthier than average, just as most people think they are better than average drivers. Of course, I could be unlucky and get knocked down by a bus tomorrow, or be lucky and slog on to 100.
The stats tell me that I have a 1.4% chance of scoring a century and getting a letter from the Queen. In fact, there is at least a 6% chance of the Queen getting a letter from the Queen (or whoever has the job in 2026), but she is not in the least bit average, and has good family precedents, with her mum hitting 101.
Our survival is governed by the "force of mortality" - the wonderfully archaic expression for the chance of dying each year. Each year, an average adult ages, this unavoidable force increases by around 9%, so that every eight years your chance of not making your next birthday roughly doubles.
But as the UK has got safer and healthier, the force-of-mortality has been decreasing for decades, so that life expectancy has been rising at about three months a year - it's odd to think we have been essentially ageing only nine months for each year that passes.
by David Spiegelhalter, BBC | Read more:
