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.

Never mind, love, it's not the end of the world.

Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

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

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

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.

Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.