We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world

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.

If you are old and you wish to be young again, if only for a moment, try and identify a dragonfly.

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

The combination of an out-of-control tabloid press and a readership that thrills to the destruction of the England head coach is something no other country can offer. Scolari was driven out; Steve McClaren's personal life made the front pages. Neither of them even held the job. Then there was the fake-sheikhing of Sven-Göran Eriksson. That a newspaper should so brilliantly and deliberately destabilise the national head coach in a World Cup year is something no other sporting nation would consider.

The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed

What politician ever thinks beyond 4 or 5 years? But such thinking is hopelessly inadequate for the big questions that involve the fabric of the world we live in