Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it

Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.

There was an advert I rather liked. Devastated woman: "I've just seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!" Husband: "Never mind, love, it's not the end of the world."

Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it

It is a truism that no row is ever about what it is about.

The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.

Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.