Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts.

A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?