If you could pick an age to be for the rest of your life, what would it be? Why?
I’d choose to be the age I am right now, with all my faculties, and with all my memories and experience still intact to draw conclusions from.
Richard Orlando, Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• Thirty-five: old enough to enjoy the positive while not subject to the negative effects of mounting years.
Philip Stigger, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
• Seventy-seven: my legs may be a bit shaky but my words and thoughts have never come clearer!
Edward Black, Church Point, NSW, Australia
• I’d go for 55. Final degree completed, work taking me to Vietnam each year, in prime health and, as a balance to academic life, helping my partner raise Angus cattle. Quite impossible to forget crisp mornings up near the Snowies, when Roger the bull would snort in pleasure as I scratched his head.
Ursula Nixon, Bodalla, NSW, Australia
• My present age plus one.
Tijne Schols, The Hague, The Netherlands
• Ten minutes older than my twin brother. We started out that far apart, and I’d hate for him to overtake me.
David Isaacs, Sydney, Australia
• Having been fortunate enough to have been “born at the right time”, as the Paul Simon song observes, I find that the age of 70 is really fine. Ask me in another 10 years and I hope the answer will be equally positive. Only time will tell ...
Margaret Wilkes, Perth, Western Australia
• Sixty-three years, 10 months, three days. Because every day of one’s life should be to live in the moment.
Charlie Bamforth, Davis, California, US
• How old was Peter Pan, who never expected to grow up? I think he was about nine. That’s the last age when I had nothing to worry about, around 1942 when the world my parents took for granted had fallen apart.
Ted Webber, Buderim, Queensland, Australia
• Second childhood. I love getting the best of both worlds. Cheerio – and pooh bah!
Jennifer Rathbone, Toronto, Canada
Your spouse’s birthday? Bad
On the scale of sin, where would you place forgetting?
Leaving aside the affected use of religious phrases or moral sentiments, for the concept of “sin” to be meaningful it can only refer to wilful acts. Genuinely forgetting doesn’t rank on the scale. Pretending to forget is something else.
Lawrie Bradly, Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
• It depends on the consequences. Spouse’s birthday? Off the top.
Joan Dawson, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
• It all depends on what you are forgetting.
John Benseman, Auckland, New Zealand
• You did what to me two weeks ago? Forgetting is forgiving and that cannot be a sin.
Doreen Forney, Pownal, Vermont, US
• Just below remembering.
Brian Cloughley, Voutenay-sur-Cure, France
• For politicians, forgetting is no sin; it’s the top priority.
Pat Phillips, Adelaide, South Australia
Listen to what the Fox said
What are the chief attributes of a soulmate?
As the Fox in The Little Prince said, “If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”
Stuart Williams, Kampala, Uganda
Any answers?
If the Guardian Weekly were an animal, what sort of animal would it be?
Mrinal Sinh Smith, London, UK
What is the most powerful skill of humankind?
Burkhard Friedrich, Berlin, Germany
Send answers to weekly.nandq@theguardian.com
