A reader sent me an old joke – you almost certainly know it. It’s about a particularly potent old man. And he’s getting married. Someone says, “Why would someone that age want to get married?” And the punch line is, “Who says he wants to?”

I now wish to make a point in the spirit of Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple). In fact, he has made this point, in another context. Would people today understand that joke, as everyone in the past would have? Or is the concept of a duty to marry, if the woman is pregnant, beyond most people now?