Two are better than one

It takes two to tango, two to make a child. Nature wasn't daft. If she didn't think it took two people to raise a child properly, she wouldn't have given us sex. We could have just split endlessly in half like amoeba and carried on forever going our smaller, separate ways. Easy, if not exactly spine-tingling. And Valentine's Day wouldn't be much fun either.

Instead, it takes two. And it takes two because, by and large, two are better than one. If nothing else, there's always a spare around. Very handy.

Which is why the latest lot of Government statistics should give us all pause for thought, however liberal and enlightened we may be. In a few years' time, more than half of all babies will be born to parents who are not married.

So what?

Well, quite a lot actually. A chunk of those will be single parents. Another chunk will be parents who live together without getting married. A sort of marriage-lite.

But marriage-lite doesn't last as long as the real thing. Far more of those partnerships collapse, leaving one parent, usually the mother, on her own with the children.

Many lone mothers - of course - do a brilliant job. Their children emerge bright, loved, successful and well-balanced. But the odds are stacked against it. Time and again statistics have proved it.

And if you cut out the father from raising a child, you inevitably cut out the father's family too. That's half your child's inheritance gone - all that potential love, those stories, support, a sense of belonging.

Marriage has a pretty rough deal really. While weddings get bigger and dafter, marriage is less popular than ever. Most of all, successive governments have seemed to be almost embarrassed by the idea of marriage and have done nothing to support it. Quite the opposite. Choosing not to marry can be quite a sensible financial decision, which, frankly, seems daft.

High profile actresses like Calista Flockhart, Jodie Foster or Liz Hurley deliberately choosing single motherhood don't help either. Adopting her second child on her own, Sharon Stone said: "Single women can do it all".

Well yes. But it's probably easier if you have a multi million dollar film star salary to do it on. For the rest of us, it's not so easy.

Marriage isn't perfect, but as a way of raising children, it's probably the best we've got.

While we're busy campaigning to save the whale, the red squirrel, village shops and English call centres, maybe we could spare a thought to try and save marriage as well, before that, too, is extinct.

AN enterprising engineer, annoyed by foul-mouthed teenagers hanging round his favourite corner shop, has invented a nifty little device that radiates a pulsing high-pitched noise at them, a noise so irritating that it seems to get inside their heads and soon drives them away. It's pitched so that only the young can hear it.

Shame.

I could just do with one of those whenever I'm in a train full of loud, boasting businessmen, booming away on their mobile phones. Or when the people on the next table talk in detail about their illnesses and operations.

I hope that engineer is working on it.

An MP has called - as one does fairly regularly - for any future children of Princes William and Harry to be educated in the state sector.

It is, of course, unthinkable - if only because we would want our royals to have the best education the country can provide, and that, sadly, is not in the local bog standard comp.

Strange, isn't it, that barely a generation ago private schools were considered second best, a last resort to be paid for only when a child had failed to get into a high flying grammar school.

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, as they doubtless say in Eton. And as they used to say once in my grammar school - until it went comprehensive.

PS on house prices.

Last week I said the average house in this country cost £170,000 and the average wage was £26,000.

New figures out this week shows that the average house price is now £200,000. The average wage is still around £26,000.

Still think it's something to celebrate?