'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp