The retired schoolteacher, resident in the Swiss town of Echallens, had a century taken off his age in a summons from a local authority sent to families with children reaching school age.

In a possible forerunner of problems with the Millennium Bug, the computer program used by the authority only looked at the final digits of years of birth - so the 105-year-old was assumed to have been born in 1993 rather than 1893.