TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

same opportunity to delay your celebrations. Similarly, anyone who feels they have wasted a year of their 20s not getting up to the usual antics can simply decide to be 19 once more. A student who has missed out on crucial schooling can make themselves 14 again.

Or, if you feel home-schooling and job stress has been prematurely ageing, I suggest you simply add on five or ten years. Perhaps you want to take early retirement after the anxiety of the preceding 12 months? No problem: simply age up in order to accurately reflect how decrepit you feel on the inside.

The only way this doesn’t work is if, like me, you’re trying to have a child. Fertility – and other biological functions – sadly do not pay attention to our Pandemic Calendar. Although there’s part of me that wonders if we just start thinking of ourselves as younger, and treating ourselves as though we’re still in the first flush of youth, then perhaps our ovaries will also relax and follow suit? (Please note: this theory has absolutely no basis in medical research.)

But for everyone else, I highly recommend choosing your own age in the same way as those children’s books used to allow us to choose our own adventure. In all official documentation, our age can henceforth be annotated by the initials ‘PC’ to denote the use of the widely accepted Pandemic Calendar. And I’ll see you in 2022 for the mother of all birthday parties.

THIS WEEK I’M…