Can this country have a better potential leader than Constance Reed of Lydiard Millicent?

While the coalition talks vaguely of the Big Society and Big Brother sends out Census 2011 forms, the 87-year-old editor of The Lydiards Magazine has shown a nifty combination of delegation and common sense, and is asking people to help her out and complete their obituaries themselves (er, before they’re dead, obviously).

And why not? Who really cares whether half the population are card-carrying Christians (that’ll be Christmas cards, presumably) or lapsed Jedis or had an ill-advised fling on the night of 27th March and woke up with a hangover and complete stranger (yes, you have to declare one of those headaches on the Census form, and it’s not the one that can be cured with a couple of paracetamol).

Nobody in Whitehall will seriously use the Census data to plan out the NHS or schools or roads and stuff. By the time they’ve got all the forms in and crunched the information, the coalition’s plans for improvements will have moved on.

By then, we’ll all be responsible for taking our own rubbish or dead grannies to the tip, and will never have to spend a Saturday evening in A&E again because hospital trusts will all be run by doctors, and the doors will remain shut because the reception staff couldn’t read the handwriting on the list of opening times.

No, the Census 2011 will only be of any use when your and my great grandchildren are trying to find out whether they are descended from captains of industry or useful keyboard players.

The Census won’t tell them that, but will be bland and faceless enough to save them from the disappointment of realising they are the spawn of mediocrity.

However, by meeting Constance’s request we can change all that. So, unless your name is Richard Branson or Professor Brian Cox (what do you mean, scientist?), now’s your chance to spring forward in time and scupper the innocent hobby of the future fruit of your loins.

Mine will begin something like this.

Sue was inadvertently born into the wrong social class, so despite her deep-seated interest in nature – particularly the study of shoreline palm trees in tropical areas – and a passion for haute cuisine, she found herself growing up near Barry Island, and spent childhood Sunday afternoons on the promenade with her parents, eating sausage and chips out of a newspaper and calling out to passers-by “I don’t know who these people are but they are not my real parents…”

Later, she moved to The Netherlands and discovered a language that involves even more spitting and coughing up phlegm than does Welsh. She also discovered that if you are working for the admin department of Holiday on Ice Europe, if the staff who are all retired performers suggest an hour’s skating on the canal after work, the word you are looking for is “no”.

So she also discovered physiotherapy.

She tried one or two career options, including civil servant, local government accounts clerk, social work assistant, estate agent, dental nurse, marketing copywriter and Mills and Boon author, before failing to get shortlisted for a Christmas job at Toys R Us. At her lowest ebb, she went into journalism instead, and managed to carve out a tiny niche in a dark corner where nobody spotted she was actually rubbish.

She had a family, who are very nice, and spent the rest of her life making lists of stuff she still had to do (much of which hung around clearing the loft). You couldn’t call her a completer-finisher, though. In fact, she never even got round to finishing this off in…