I ABSOLUTELY can’t. And I am baffled that you can.

Let me take you through my calculations.

I am 42 now and I reckon I’m good for another 38 years. This might, of course, prove hopelessly optimistic. My wife thinks it will. Whenever she sees me head for the fridge, she expresses the fear that at a young age she will be the world’s first recorded Diet Coke widow.

Considering that she is a doctor, she is a little vague over exactly how the Diet Coke will kill me. Ring-pull finger, perhaps. Or there was that Sue Townsend novel where the guy chokes on a bottle during a car accident. I’ve had to promise that when I’m driving I’ll only drink from a can.

Let’s assume the fizzy drink doesn’t get me. It is a reasonable guess that I will die on March 21, 2043 at about 2pm. This will be a convenient moment. I’ll have had lunch and there won’t be anything on TV yet.

So I have 332,880 hours left.

I’ll spend 129,818 of these hours either in bed or in the bathroom. And given my working week and the amount of time I spend in the car travelling to and from the office, I’ll use up a further 91,080 hours earning a living, even if I retire at a reasonable age in order to stand outside the Post Office with a shopping trolley on wheels.

It will take me 25,483 hours and 10 minutes to prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner. This, incidentally, proves that Jamie Oliver is wrong. You may add two years to your life by eating only carefully prepared meals, but you will spend almost all of it chopping onions.

As a result of these meals I will occupy 10,402 hours washing-up, plus a further 56 hours complaining that we’ve run out of Brillo pads and, of course, there will be the time I spend buying Brillo pads (0 minutes). And naturally I’ll need to go to the supermarket. This would normally take, let’s say, 1 hour a week. However, I now use the internet to save time. I shop for 45 minutes online and then use 45 minutes to go the supermarket because I asked them to bring lemon drizzle cake and they brought some lemons and an umbrella instead.

I have set aside 21,170 hours for reading. I should spend it on improving books but will instead use at least half of it reading Robert Crampton’s column in the Times magazine.

I will need time to buy Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, because The Eye said I had to. Then I’ll listen to it once, remember that I hated it, and try selling it on eBay. A man in Arizona will pay me £2.78 and it will cost me £2.79 to post it to him. Twenty years later I will do this a second time.

Once I’ve watched television, gone out for dinner, looked after the children, lost and found my mobile phone, been “held in a queue” on the telephone for 1,898 hours, shouted at the Today programme, looked for parking places, opened three letters a day asking me to join the “Porcelain Figurine of the Month Club” and offering me a free leatherette-bound copy of The Wind in the Willows if I do, explained to my mother that I still don’ t like cauliflower soup, written a book, listened a sufficient number of times to God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, backed the car gently into a tree and gone to synagogue, I’ll have only 5,003 hours left to live.

I will also have to buy 13 new computers and install the software on each of them, spending at least a week each time calling up the company that sold it to me to ask what “Error message 413b” means and why every time I try to print something it says “hardware device not detected”.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden