I was sorry to read about the break up of Paul and Heather (Mills) McCartney's marriage. Not just because it's all happened a month before his 64th birthday, lending a grim irony to Paul's jolly and useless song about this subject. Though if that was written about Linda then there is also a grim irony about.
Selfishly I was mainly upset because I have
a good joke about them and am worried that the change in circumstances might make this less funny. In the short term it makes me look topical and more of a genius than I am already, but by August, will people be thinking, "Yeah, but they're getting divorced now, so that doesn't work"? Probably not. But I had come up with a conclusion to my show about the whole legs issue. That it was sad to think of Paul in the afternoon with two legs and that it's better when two legs become four (George Orwell was right about that - two legs bad, four legs good), but three legs is as good as four legs. It's not the actual legs that are important. It's finding the right person. So two legs can be good if it's two one-legged getting together. Six legs sounds good, but it's probably going to lead to trouble. Ten legs is a man having sex with an octopus, which society thinks is wrong, but he may just be trying to help the human race evolve (a reference to the gag about me having sex with fish and dolphins). Or ten legs could be a two legged man with a one legged woman and a seven legged octopus, which in my opinion is a bad thing. There's no way that could happen by accident. The man would have had to contrive to have a limb removed from either the woman or the octopus to satisfy this perverse desire. The chances of finding a one legged woman who was up for having sex with a man and a seven legged octopus seem small to me and even if you did it would then take a long time to find an octopus that had lost a limb and that was interested in interspecial three in a bed sex. I think the octopus would be in the situation under duress and probably be deformed for the purposes of the encounter. Which I don't think is right.
The point was going to be that finding the right person would be better than being alone (though the show is going to argue that being on your own is OK too and preferrable to being with the wrong person, so maybe it can still work). A slight change of emphasis may make all this work out fine and maybe even better, but I love that riddle of the sphinx joke and it's a shame if anything happens to make it less perfect. I have also been finding it interesting that people give it a little bit of an "ooooh" as if it's a very offensive thing to say - and of course Radio 4 censored it, but I can't really see what is offensive about it. I've taken to saying "It's just mathematics, there's nothing offensive about it. If you're going to be pedantic it's three and a half legs, but why ruin something so poetically beautiful with pedantry?" Is it offensive to point out that someone has a leg missing? I am not making any derogatory comment about it. It's just a better answer to the riddle.
