I saw this letter in The Times earlier this week. It made me laugh.

I am a poor pensioner and taxpayer – I cannot afford to pay for your sexual urges.
The world and South Africa has enough people, please don’t be stupid and selfish and add more at my expense.

More people means more power stations are needed, more schools, more hospitals, more houses, more jobs (from where?), more dams, more roads, more prisons, more police, more global warming and so on, and I am expected to pay for all of this.

Think of me, yourselves, the rest of the world and the child before you make babies.

RL, by email

While RL’s plea may strike a chord with a number of  taxpayers, who (as in most other countries around the world) subsidise those “less fortunate” than themselves, I can’t see his/her message catching on. With 4.3 babies born per second worldwide, another 17.2 (ish) have arrived while you’ve been reading this sentence. Don’t tell RL – that sort of stat would kill him/her.

Of course, if RL was to pop his/her clogs, then it would – by RL’s reckoning, at least – be a good thing for the world. We’d need 0.00000001 less hospitals, 0.00000001 less power stations and dams. Schools would probably be unaffected, but there would be 1 whole house more. Which has got to be a step in the right direction. Unless you’re RL. 

However, if RL were to be cremated, that would add to global warming, so instead, we’d need more space in the local cemetery.  

Hmm. Swings and roundabouts. No – wait – that’s a playground, not a cemetery. But you know what I mean.

The problem with RL’s idea of thinking of him/her before submitting to your sexual urges is that, were one to think about a grumbling pensioner (like thinking of dead kittens or Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (remember her?)) while in the throes of passion, then the sexual urges would probably go away. Rapidly.

But then, maybe that’s RL’s plan.