It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.