Longevity depends on your species

When a baby is born, there is a tag on its ankle with ‘best before .. etc’ stamped on it.

The nurses remove these tags, lest the dates on them distress the doting parents. In 1944, an Irish male had a life expectancy of 59 years, which means that I am well past my sell-by date. But it’s great to be still around; some of my friends haven’t been so lucky. Indeed, there are people dying now who never died before! But, as Maurya says in Riders to the Sea, “no man at all can be living for ever and we must be satisfied”.

Thanks to science, the tags on today’s babies carry much more ambitious dates; a boy born in Ireland this year has a life expectancy of 78 years and a girl can expect to reach the age of 81. Medical advances will push these limits even further; life-expectancies may soon pass the 100 mark. Jeanne Louise Calment, of Arles in the South of France, lived for 122 years and 164 days, the longest human life on record.