The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.