So much for youth and vitality. The British Chiropractic Association has warned - trying not to sound too pleased about it - that the number of patients its members see under the age of 30 has shot up in the past year.
To blame? The iPhone neck-crane, the workplace slouch, the "sedentary epidemic" that makes the life of a young person increasingly hard to distinguish - in terms of movement hither and thither - from that of an octogenarian with short-term memory loss and a passion for House of Cards.
Now almost half of 16-24-year-olds report aches in the neck and pains in the back - a rise of 60 per cent since last year. However valid the study (and some might quibble with the science of chiropractors), I hope the younger generation as a whole feels a little sheepish about this. Typically, of course, the young do too much of something: too much taking of drugs, too much producing of children. All the same it would be a pity if the current form of overindulgence - too much sitting on your arse and looking at your phone - came to define the class of 2015.
Neck and back pain belong, in the Platonic order of things, to the old; to those who've found out that it's actually the heaviness of being that's unbearable; to those who've talked enough about vertebrae with relative strangers to have been told, by at least one philosophic hunchback, that it's the fast pace of human evolution to blame ("We just weren't designed to walk on two feet...").
One can't help but feel that coming to the end of your spinal grace period when barely started on the true slog of life is a bit wretched. Our parents went to the chiropractors after children and mortgages and Black Monday. We go because of Facebook.
