Deborah Orr: These teenage mums made a bad choice, but it could have been worse

A less selfish discourse might come up with useful answers about how we can change things

The other morning I was accosted on the street by a desperate looking young man, who asked me for £1.99 to buy a bargain toy he'd seen that was "too good to miss". Was it for himself, or for a child? I didn't ask. I found myself wondering something else. How come this guy has lost enough self-respect that he'll beg from strangers, but not so much that he'll simply steal their cash?

The other morning I was accosted on the street by a desperate looking young man, who asked me for £1.99 to buy a bargain toy he'd seen that was "too good to miss". Was it for himself, or for a child? I didn't ask. I found myself wondering something else. How come this guy has lost enough self-respect that he'll beg from strangers, but not so much that he'll simply steal their cash?

This is not an idle question. This man was willing to indulge in what's considered to be anti-social behaviour. But committing an old-fashioned crime against the person was, for the time being at least, beyond his personal remit. It is worth bearing in mind, as the nation convulses under the excitement of yet another lament for the loss of decency, that there are a lot of people making choices like his, and that maybe they are condemned for those choices when they are by no means the worst ones they could be making.

Take these children in Derby who are being sneered at by the nation for having a baby each at 12, 14 and 16. Yes, the story is an awful and fascinating one. It may have volumes to say about whether government policy is right or wrong. But we should not lose sight of some of the other, simpler things that it also tells us.

First, while commentators say that a lack of moral standards has led young girls to make such a mess of their lives, the girls are on newspaper front pages exactly because people are still united in the belief that this is not what a bunch of young girls should be doing. We're told that the inappropriate behaviour of their 38-year-old mother, Julie Atkins, was a neighbourhood scandal. Families who behave like this one may not now be put in the workhouse, but they do face social censure.

Second, as the old argument goes on about how young girls are given too much incentive by the welfare state to have their babies, this is surely part of the problem. Maybe they are also given too little incentive not to have their babies. One thing that hasn't changed since the Sixties is that there's not much for children under 18 to do.

Third, we know that teenagers most likely to have babies are the ones with the fewest choices. Without the prospect of a good job, perhaps they reached the point where they made the right choice awfully early.

Fourth, much huffing and puffing about how much these girls are costing us in money now, and how much their badly brought up children will cost us in the future is being indulged in. Maybe if we tried to have a less selfish discourse about why it was that a whole family conspired together to steal their own childhoods, then some more useful answers about how we can change things might emerge.

Fifth is that while women can get on well without men in their lives, the fact is that children don't find this quite so easy. It wasn't just their ghastly mum who stole the childhoods of these girls, but their absent dads as well.

Finally, we must not lose sight of the fact that these girls, with the help of their inadequate parents, have taken paths that are primarily self-destructive. At a personal and at a societal level, they are making logical choices. It is sad that they are logical. But these girls are avoiding other, more terrible choices that young people make every day, and not getting any support for doing so.

Kitchen sink drama

That prurient interest in celebrities, and how to explain it? Could the fascination be because they're just so different to ordinary mortals? Is it true, for example, that the supposed affair between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie was really just a publicity stunt?

The story is that the whole thing was aimed at compensating for the fact that their new film Mr and Mrs Smith, left, is the greatest turkey since, ooh, since Star Wars opened last week.

Ms Jolie herself denies that there was an affair. Meanwhile, we're told that Brad studied journalism before becoming an actor, and is a keen amateur architect who is about to start working with Frank Gehry on a seafront development in Brighton. He loves Angelina's adopted son Maddox, and is thinking about getting one for himself.

This reminds the public that Ms Aniston wouldn't give Brad the baby he wanted - which is supposedly the real reason for their break-up. That fact is emphasised by the actress from Desperate Housewives wearing a jokey T-shirt saying "I'll have your baby, Brad". I do hope you're still following.

Yes, these people really are different, since they do appear to be happy to sell their film on the back of their messy private lives. But sadly, they're just the same as the rest of the culture, in that both women in the triangle are blamed while the man is seen somehow as a victim of manipulative females - especially by other females.

This Sudoku business is far too puzzling

A female chess player writing in the New Statesman asserts that the Sudoku craze finally lays to rest the idea that men are more logical than women. In competitive chess circles, Ruth Sheldon explains, all the best players, and most of the nearly as good ones, are men. Until now, this has been put down to gender differences in brain function. She herself, having laboured under the cultural pressures subtly placed on the few women who try to break into the tight little world of chess, has always considered this to be a wrong-headed and frankly illogical assumption. In Sudoku, unhampered by the finely tuned rituals of exclusion that have built up in chess over centuries, female players are just as numerous, obsessive and successful as men. Which is a most interesting observation.

But it still doesn't address the matter that completely bamboozles me. I thought that everybody in the country - the men and the women - were totally stressed out from endlessly busting a gut to achieve a decent work-life balance, and completely unable to predict when the next five-minute-sit-down-with-a-nice-cup-of-tea was coming from. The great mystery, surely, is how the hell these millions, whatever their gender, are suddenly conjuring up the time and energy that is surely necessary in order to indulge their new hobby.

¿ At the private view of Tracey Emin's new exhibition on Thursday, impressions of the artist's genitals were everywhere, winningly etched, sketched, photographed, painted, appliqued and embroidered. They were even rendered in white glass and neon. Was Emin's family in attendance, I hear you wonder, and were they shocked? I can only report that her brother definitely was. He stepped backwards right into one of his sister's magnificently leggy inert gas sprawls, causing it to explode, and experiencing what he described as "the biggest electric shock of my life". Nice to see that at least one family in Britain remains properly Freudian.