Don't do it!: Paul McCartney and Heather Mills before their wedding still dodder along at that impossibly ancient age. "Doing the garden, digging the weeds!
" Paul warbled, his voice sped up slightly so that it sounded reedier than usual. "Who could ask for more?"
64th year, his romantic life would still be the sort of whirlwind of acrimony that usually disgraces middle youth.
For the past week or so, barely a day has gone by without some fresh titbit feeding divorce.
violence and various squalid abuses, including refusing her a bedpan so that she was forced to crawl, on her hands and remaining leg, to the bathroom in the night. He had stabbed her with a broken wineglass.
He pushed a coffee table at her.
Nobody was supposed to read of these horrors outside court, but somehow they were leaked and faxed to the Press Association. Now fax that day.
And so it goes on.
birthday, that they were going to divorce, both Macca and Mucca for their marital difficulties. They had a point: Heather had only clingy.
She was a publicity hound, a gold-digger. She was a snob, insisting everyone call her "Lady" when she clearly wasn't one. She was pushy.
She made Paul dye his hair and have plastic surgery. His did; they never tired of reviling her.
So it is surprising, really, how much more they have managed to living national treasure.
With all the stories circulating about her past career as a prostitute, saying that she lied about this even to Paul McCartney, she has no hope of making her own mud stick.
said that they don't believe any of it. Indeed, it would be about the bedpan as one blogger put it crudely, a it.
According to The Sun, moreover, no less a luminary than crawling anywhere, with or without her prosthetic leg. "Kate has seen her jumping like a gazelle and will swear to it," they gloated. Even Billie Piper, famous for playing Dr Who's sidekick, has an opinion worth noting.
"You do start to hate Heather, don't you?" she said. "It's awful.
" Expect all the former Spice Girls and the cast of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! to settlement." Macca is worth a billion, but is notoriously tight.
Mucca has, they say, demanded 100 million; she could realistically hope for 20 million, excluding whatever Beatrice that is, if Mills is awarded custody.
Meanwhile, her lawyer says she "stands by everything filed at court on her behalf" and is prepared to prove it, while McCartney "It's just a media spectacle," said Daily Mirror music critic Gavin Martin. "Who knows what goes on inside a marriage?
They are extraordinary creatures, both of them." McCartney, he said, was born into a city devastated by the war, lost his mother at an early age and then, somehow, developed into one of the most remarkable composers Britain has known. "And Heather Mills is a woman with one leg who has led, by any account, a picaresque life of variety and weirdness.
"
Heather Mills McCartney is, indeed, rather weird. She ditched her former fiance, Chris Terrill, when she met Sir Paul, just six days before they were due to be married. And the tabloids have, of course, thrived on accusations that she was once a very high-class something she has vigorously denied.
She also denies having made a porn film.
There is no denying, however, the oiled-up nude photographs career as a glamour model. Anyone with a mouse can boot up images of Mills striking poses with a male model.
Props include a whip and lots of strawberries and cream. The papers gleefully describe these pictures as "hard core". Actually, the worst thing about them is Mills' poodle perm.
But how is this for weird? Some years ago, before she met Sir Paul, she spent about a year passing herself off as another Heather Mills, a journalist with The Observer, in the hope that she The other Heather Mills, who now writes for the satirical magazine of her cuttings to meetings with television executives.
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