Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.