Richard Herring: The magpie reward system will only bring
you sorrow
Friday 29 Nov 2013
I saw a
magpie this week. One for sorrow, as you may remember from the theme tune of
the children’s TV show Magpie. It’s basically a magpie reward system. ‘One for
sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. Five for silver, six
for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. Ma-aa-aa-aag-pie.’
But the
magpie reward system is deeply flawed. Because, I’d say, about 95 per cent of
the time, you will only see one magpie at a time. And what’s the reward for
that? Oh, it’s sorrow. How convenient.
The magpie reward system promises a lot but delivers very little. You might
think: ‘Ooooh, I’m going to go out looking for magpies. Maybe I’ll get a secret
never to be told…’ No, it’s sorrow again, as usual. Thanks to the magpie reward
system, 95 per cent of human existence is lived in abject misery.
And that’s
the first line of the song, so it doesn’t even have to rhyme with anything.
They could have tried something a bit more positive than sorrow. Not anything
amazing, though, as seeing one magpie is easy. Something like ‘one for some
Tupperware containers’ or ‘one for a 2-for-1 voucher exchangeable at any
Harvester restaurant (Monday through Thursday)’.
Even ‘one
for nothing’ would have been better – if you see one magpie, then nothing
happens, your emotional mood doesn’t alter, you go on living your life,
ostensibly, as if you hadn’t seen any magpies at all. At least then we wouldn’t
all be living in fear of a single magpie drifting into our field of vision.
How many
people are killed each year because they’re walking around with their eyes
closed for fear of seeing a magpie? I’ve looked into this. There are no
government statistics on that subject. I suspect a cover-up.
For two
magpies you get joy. Which seems a bit of an extreme leap in rewards for just
one more magpie. From the worst human emotion to the best human emotion!
You’d think
the magpies could have some kind of sliding scale: one for sorrow, two for mild
depression, three for a nagging sense of ennui, four for slight digestive
discomfort, five for being a bit perked up like you’ve had a Berocca, six for
smugly self-satisfied, seven for joy.
But there’s
nowhere for them to go, so the song veers away from causing or curing mental
illness.
Three is for
a girl and four is for a boy. I guess it’s aimed at expectant mothers. But what
if you’d been waiting until the birth to find out the child’s sex only for the
magpies to blurt it out and ruin everything?
Five is for
silver, which seems proportionate. Six is for gold. The magpies have got the
idea. That’s better than silver. You should get gold, because the chances of
seeing six magpies is 14million to one. Coincidentally, the same odds as
winning the National Lottery.
Maybe we
should have a magpie-based lottery. You pay in your pound, then at the end of
the week you write to Camelot and tell them the maximum number of magpies
you’ve seen that week. It’s based on honesty. Six magpies is the jackpot, three
a guaranteed tenner, two joy and one sorrow.
Seven is ‘a
secret never to be told’. Which is not as good as gold! If you see seven
magpies, you get sent an envelope with a secret inside it but if you open it,
it spontaneously combusts. So six magpies is gold, seven you get a parcel bomb.
The magpie
reward system must be overhauled.
