TO me, you and just about everyone else, the figures being bandied about in this week s coverage in the national media of the McCartney/Mills divorce settlement are mind-boggling. So is the ex-Beatle worth £400m or £800m? It hardly seems to matter when th

TO me, you and just about everyone else, the figures being bandied about in this week's coverage in the national media of the McCartney/Mills divorce settlement are mind-boggling.

So is the ex-Beatle worth £400m or £800m? It hardly seems to matter when the amounts are so astronomically high.

His ex-wife, it was reported, wanted £125m of his fortune but to her displeasure got only a fifth of that.

Just a little under £25m - how can a poor girl live on that?

Put another way, she gets £700 for each hour she was married to Sir Paul which is not a bad little earner. If that was related to her working the average of 7.5 hours a day, she would earn £159,687 a month. Compare this with the average mechanic who would take over seven years to earn the same amount or a teacher who would take five-and-a-half years and one begins to realise just how much different her world is to ours.

Some of the smaller amounts which made up part of her claim had me gasping in amazement.

Everyone should enjoy an annual holiday and most save towards one but Miss Mills wanted £499,000 a year for her holidays. There was another £125,000 for clothes, a whopping £542,000 for security, £30,000 - more than the average earning for Joe Public - for equestrian activities (although she no longer rides) and a swoon-inducing £39,000 for wine (that's a lot of bottles) although she does not drink.

Oh, and she also wanted £400,000 for a new swimming pool at her mansion in Sussex.

Money can't buy you love, obviously in this case, but it sure can buy just about anything else.

Sir Paul turned 65 just a little while ago, but he does not need to pull in his belt now that he is a pensioner. And that goes for a lot of others who have reached that stage of their lives when they finally start getting a little something back from the State after so many years of feeding it a mass of money.

Traditional views of life on a pension as a time to wind down and relax are increasingly outdated, I learn from a survey this week.

People retiring in 2008 see it as an opportunity to do the things they've always wanted. Only 14 per cent of those questioned said they were looking forward to putting their feet up.

Of the rest, more than a quarter said they wanted to spend at least three months of the year abroad, with many looking to learn a foreign language, and a little over half wanted to set up home somewhere else in the world..

Writing a novel was the aim of more than one in 10, similar to those planning to learn a musical instrument. Four per cent said they were resolved to learn to scuba dive.

And seven per cent (perhaps Sir Paul is among them) intend to find a new partner.

It's good to see there's life in the old dogs yet.