The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the second world war and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.

The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, "I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams."

Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside.

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.