What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.

Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

As with email, the recipient of a texted question seems to have the option to ignore it, while nevertheless saying hello, lovely day, and so on.

Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?

The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.

It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.