What men don't want, in fact what anyone who's any sort of thrill-seeking, intelligent adult doesn't want, is some crushing bore describing their emotions in real time every waking hour.

Only those who haven't got the wit to speak for themselves would ever want their clothes to do it for them.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

And call me a pig, but isn't it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they're still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they're hanging the Closed sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam.

Being a monarchist - saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another - is just as warped and strange as being a racist.

Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

The allegedly 'classy' magazines often seem to be in an endless, undeclared competition to see who can climb furthest up the fundament of Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Lopez.