One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
Cleanliness is the scourge of art.
Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.
How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'
Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.
Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster.
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.
Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.
There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling.
The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.
Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.
The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.
