Easy-peasy: somewhere rich (this week’s column comes via the Research Institute of the Bleeding Obvious). Office for National Statistics figures released in December showed that for a long life, please emerge into the universe in Camden (for women, 86.8 years) or Kensington & Chelsea (for men, 83.7 years).

Can’t afford to be born on the most expensive patches of land in the country? Hmm. Have you considered numbers two and three on the lists? East Dorset? The Chilterns? Perhaps Hart, just off the M3? Insufficient funds available? There’s the rub.

In Britain, we’ve recorded national life expectancy since the 19th century, but local variations only since the early 1990s. National life expectancy has risen since 1991, though there’s been a slowdown since 2010. Examine local variations and you’ll see why. In Glasgow City, life expectancy for men is 73.4 years; just outside Glasgow, in West Dunbartonshire, it’s 78.8 years for women.

More depressingly still, life expectancy in dozens of places has actually dropped since 2010, the first time in decades. Last month, Public Health England revealed that life expectancy had fallen by more than a year for men in Hartlepool and women in Amber Valley, Derbyshire. Grim.