You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing.

"God save our gracious Queen": Why would we invoke a non-specific deity to bail out these unelected spongers?

My wife bought me a vintage Gibson guitar that isn't just beautiful but has tremendous sentimental value. I have plenty of guitars for live gigs but this is one to treasure.

Why do people want to swim with dolphins? The equivalent would be an Indonesian fellow coming over here, going up to a farmer and saying 'Can I get in with the cows? I just fancy scuffling about with them.'

Yes. Yes, when we live our life like 1950s detective films. I often go to my fridge, "Hullo, we're out of milk. I say mother, where's the milk?"

But our country's equivalent of gritty reality is more like "Look out Sarge, he's got a shooter!"

I'm a vegetarian, I'm not strict. I eat fish. And duck, but they're nearly fish aren't they.