Richard Ord: Heard the one about the three-legged chicken?

Startled, he puts his foot down and follows it up the country lane until it screeches round a bend and tears into a farmyard.

The bloke pulls up, jumps out of his car and runs into the farm. Straight away he sees a farmer in a white coat and a clipboard pacing up and down and runs over to tell him what he has just seen.

The farmer listens, nods and, putting his arm around the bloke’s shoulder, tells him not to worry.

“We have been working on this for years,” he says. “There’s tremendous competition in the food industry and chicken legs are big sellers across the globe.

“Problem is, chickens are expensive to rear. Everyone is looking for an edge to get ahead, but it costs to feed and house chickens and we only get two legs out of them.

“What, we thought, if we could get more legs per chicken?

“Genetics has advanced immeasurably over the years, so rather than going down the route of factory farming or breeding bigger chickens, we thought we’d get the edge by developing the three-legged chicken.

“We hired the country’s finest genetic scientists to mess around with chicken DNA and this is what they came up with.

“It’s taken a long time but we are now able to breed our very own three-legged chickens for the world market.”

The bloke is impressed but has just one burning question.

“That’s brilliant,” he says, “But what do three-legged chickens taste like?”

The farmer looks him straight in the eye.

“Don’t know,” he says, “we’ve never caught one.”

What, I hear you ask, has this got to do with Brexit?

Well, I could argue that the three-legged chicken is a metaphor for the elusive perfect Brexit, but, in truth, I was just hoping to give you a break from the depressing fall out of yet another vote on the EU which, depending on your viewpoint, will herald the age of oppressive darkness across our land ... but with the bonus of being able to choose the shape of our bananas. Hence the distracting joke.

It’s one of only four jokes I can ever remember. I bring them out in times of need. This may be one.

Here’s my second joke, and no, the answer is not ‘Theresa May’s Brexit deal.’

Question: What’s brown and sticky?

Answer: A stick.

I’ll save my other two jokes for the next EU Referendum.

The last word should go to the wag who commented on our story about Asda’s new pillow which, at only £12, claims to stop users from ever snoring again. While most people either wanted to buy one for their noisy partners or dismissed the supermarket’s claims, one reader said this: “It works. Gently insert a pillow up each nostril ...”

Genius.