LYING about your age is in the news.

Those kids from the Calais Jungle reminded me of the cast of Grease, pupils at Rydell High who looked at least 35.

And the cult bluesman known as Seasick Steve has been shown to be 10 years younger than he claimed. That wasn’t his only fib. He said that he lived the life of a freight train-jumping hobo in America’s Deep South, wearing dungarees and fashioning his wacky stringed instruments out of wooden spatulas and tin cans. He said he was born in 1941 but it turns out to have been 1951 and he worked as a session musician on disco records which rather dents his cred. Still he’s not the first performer to have fibbed about his age though admittedly it’s more usual to knock off a few years rather than add them on.

I meanwhile am 29.