OK, admit it, who doesn't read books?

I read the Mail on Sunday (sorry, but I do) and it had an amazing statistic in it. The average Briton will read 533 books in their lifetime.
I'll repeat that. The average Briton will read 533 books in their lifetime.
OK, I thought, that's not too bad......
Then I thought again. Hang on, said my little inner bibliophile, you read an estimated 1 book every two weeks (not counting school holidays and cold winter days when the best thing to do is to snuggle under a duvet with Jane Austen). That's 25 books a year. That's 250 books in ten years and your lifetime average in 20......

And if I assume that my reading career started at 12 (when a book a week was slow) then I could have chalked up my first 500 in the ten years before I hit my working life and a career intervened...

But hang on a cotton picking minute, are they counting childrens books as well, I wondered. In which case I probably covered my 500 before I left primary school.

And do they include text books?

So I paused long enough to make a pot of tea and get a piece of paper (I work better digitally; that is, using my fingers rather than a calculator) and I began to add.

Assuming that childrens books do count, let's estimate a generous 200 for my years to 12.

500 for my adolescence and time as an English Student (course notes read; be aware this course will include some reading and should not be entered into lightly. For four years I only had to have a book in my hand to be working. Whoopee)

Let's start being really generous here and say I only read a book a fortnight, with ten per cent extra allowed at the end for errors, then that's 20 years worth making 500 plus 50 (that's the ten percent)

Now we're into prediction. Let's roll with the Bible, three score years and ten or may hap four score. OK (apart from the idea that I am actually in the middle of my God-prescribed life span which will freak me out if I think about it. Oh, Lordy, I am Middle Aged. *shudder*) That gives me somewhere between thirty and forty years reading left. At 250 every ten years plus the ten percent error, that's somewhere between 800 and 1100 books left to read.

In my lifetime, my estimate of books that I may possibly read is (pause to remove socks and count toes)..........

2,300 books. And I think I own every one of them already.

So, own up, which 4 of you never read to balance this figure?

Or am I looking in the wrong place?

And is now a good time to remind everyone that Edward VIII once asserted that the only book he ever tried to read was Treasure Island, and he didn't finish that because it was boring. So, not only a council estate problem then.