It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and your life's a disaster. In real life it's often impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes-often-neck and neck.

I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, "What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?

The old Chinese proverb springs to mind - No pain, no gain.

why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.

In an unpredictable and unpleasant world it was both unusual and very pleasant to hear what I wanted to hear.

So I'm back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given life's rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, probably.

I'd rather eat nothing than eat a carrot.