Wonderful news from the Office for National Statistics - teenagers are dying out. There are 1m fewer of them around than there were in 1981, apparently, a rate of decline which should see them totally extinct some time in the next century. I suppose we could hurry the process along with rifles, much as we did with the coypu in the late 1980s.

However, even if we let nature take its course, one fine day we will all be able to go out of an evening without worrying about being stabbed - even if we have forgotten why we were going out in the first place. The corollary being that we will be a nation which consists entirely of gently disoriented pensioners and instead of alcopops and class A drugs the country will be awash with weak tea, Werther’s Originals and urine.

It’s time to invest in whoever makes those tartan shopping trolleys old people always seem to have, the ones with the spike that they deliberately dig into your leg when you try to get past them on the pavement; we’ll be needing many more of those. And can you imagine the queues at post offices (if they still exist) in 2108?

But all in all, the country will be a kinder and happier place. It often occurred to me that we should get rid of the horrible concept of teenagerdom, which was invented in about 1947 and has made life almost unbearable ever since. Instead, it seems we will get rid of teenagers themselves, which is a perfectly acceptable alternative.

I suppose it will mean that as a nation we eventually become extinct, too - but that seems a small price to pay for a few precious years of peace. Nobody likes us very much, anyway. We could always tell the rest of the world that we were making ourselves extinct because of our deep guilt over slavery. Or global warming.

Oddly, this news has not been reported with the untrammelled glee one might imagine, though. There are the usual worries that we will not be able to pay for our pensions - and this provides the cue for politicians to insist on welcoming swathes of immigrants from the few remaining countries which think that living here is a good thing.

The industrious Poles, we are told, will pay for our pensions - but of course they won’t; they work here for a year or two in low-paid, low-taxed jobs and then get the hell out, as we are seeing right now. Almost all the eastern Europeans who come here find work and work very hard - and then they leave.

The immigrants who do stay are those who, like the Somalians, do absolutely no work whatsoever and instead live off state benefits.

The latest figures suggest that more than 80% of Somalians in Britain do no paid work at all. However, these immigrants are very busy in other ways; almost a quarter of children born in this country are now the offspring of women who were themselves born abroad - and not largely, I suspect, in Lvov or Gdansk. The cost of providing maternity services to immigrants has doubled in the past 10 years.

Either way you look at it, immigration will not be an answer to our economic problems, even if you accept that we may have a moral duty to accept incomers from places which, even by our falling standards, are magnificently unpleasant, such as Somalia.

Our population, meanwhile, rises in net terms by about 200,000 every year - or a city the size of Birmingham every decade. It is not inconceivable that the declining birth rate among indigenous British people is related, subconsciously or otherwise, to living space which is palpably overcrowded.

Countries which have relatively low population densities are often those in which the people have a high standard of living and express satisfaction with their lives - Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand.

Funnily enough, these are also the places where the Brits head when they’ve had enough of living here.

+ Allison Fraser, the head of Sandwell metropolitan council in the West Midlands, has apparently been sent on a £5,000 course to enable her to “like herself” better. She began trying to like herself in Germany and will soon be encouraged to like herself even more in Orlando, Florida. It’s part of a professional life-awareness programme, or some such. I suppose you can understand it: I’ve known about Ms Fraser for all of three minutes and already I can’t stand the woman. She, meanwhile, has had almost continuous exposure to herself over the past 40 or 50 years, so you can see why the course is so long and so expensive. That dislike is deep-rooted; there’s a lot of remedial work to be done. Maybe Sandwell’s rate payers should also be sent on a course in the United States to enable them to like Ms Fraser a little more than they do at present. Some, I reckon, may be tempted to say: “Look, just get the bins emptied, love, and if you have to do it from within a pit of self-loathing, so be it.” Our district councils reach new levels of absurdity every week. Did you know, by the way, that Leeds city council has a “climate change officer”? It does, it does.

Playing to the wrong crowd
Most of us knew he was a wrong ’un back in 1973. That horrible, faux-startled expression he always wore on Top of the Pops and the continual invitation to “touch” him. Now I think of it, the kids in my class who liked Gary Glitter back then turned out to be wrong ’uns too, in one way or another. Little rat-faced specimens for ever attempting to ingratiate themselves with the teacher and who have all ended up as estate agents. When I was 12, the cool kids liked T Rex, Roxy Music and would just about stomach Sweet’s mid-period nonsense: Block Buster, The Ballroom Blitz and so on. The lumpenprole cannon fodder went for the cheery, meaty dross of Slade and Mud - and the wrong ’uns, the people to be punched in the dinner queue or who got wired up to the mains in physics, they liked Gary Glitter and Showaddywaddy. And Alvin Stardust. Only people like Lord Levy could find musical pleasure in such “artists”.

There was a similar demarcation among the girls. The boring fat ones with greasy hair liked the Osmonds; the ones with an agreeable glint of wickedness and somewhat looser morals liked David Cassidy. I trust that this has been an insightful and helpful comment upon the return to these shores of Paul Gadd.

Multiple wives? Multiple problems

A new study from a British university seems to suggest that men who are polygamists live longer than those with just one wife - 12% longer, in fact. But before we rush off to the wife market (or “Yates’s Wine Lodge”, as it is called over here), we should consider the possibility that the scientists have got things the wrong way around.

In societies where polygamy is common, it is the most fit, healthy and affluent men who have more than one wife. Women are disinclined to get themselves hitched to men who are likely to croak within a few years or months - they do that only in the West, where the laws of inheritance are somewhat different.

So it is not the case that having lots of wives enables men to live longer - they would have lived longer anyway, even without the profusion of ghastly wives whining at them all day long, telling them to put up shelves in the mud hut and stopping them smoking in the bedroom.

It is more accurate to think of these multiple wives instead as a sort of progressive tax on happiness, designed to spread the load of human misery.

I can see that there is something truly Olympian in swimming through a storm for six miles or so while some hatchet-faced German hag tries to drown you - so the 10,000-metre open water event is a worthy addition to the Games. But the BMX bike event brings to mind my two-year-old daughter tearing up and down the hall on her Fireman Sam scooter. It is as if hopscotch or marbles had been made an Olympic event . . .

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