‎If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you're in trouble, need a hand out of a corner..." "Yeah?" "Please don't hesitate to get lost.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Mark Carwardine's role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.

He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis' underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of cornflakes. But he couldn't, and he didn't feel safe.

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

And the most interesting natural structure? A giant, two-thousand-mile-long fish in orbit around Jupiter, according to a reliable report in the Weekly World News. The photograph was very convincing, and I'm only surprised that more-reputable journals like New Scientist, or even just The Sun, haven't followed up with more details. We should be told.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.