Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.

We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

Love delayed is lust augmented.

The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.

Like many men, I am not ashamed to admit that my principal joys are domestic. I love cooking, and I love looking after my children. Indeed, the times that I have with them are the only ones when I feel unconditionally happy.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.