..and Only Sticks And Stones Can Break

Being Clever Was When You Looked At How Things Were And Used The Evidence To Work Out Something New.

Jane Austen Was Writing About Boring People With Desperately Limited Lives. We Forget This Because We've Seen Too Many Of Her Books On Screen.

There's Something Rather Wonderful About The Fact That Oxford Is A Very Small City That Contains Most Of The Cultural And Metropolitan Facilities You Could Want, In Terms Of Bookshops, Theatre, Cinema, Conversation. But It's Near Enough To London To Get Here In An Hour, And It's Near Enough To Huge Open Spaces Without Which I Would Go Insane.

And When You Look At The Sky You Know You Are Looking At Stars Which Are Hundreds And Thousands Of Light-years Away From You. And Some Of The Stars Don’t Even Exist Anymore Because Their Light Has Taken So Long To Get To Us That They Are Already Dead, Or They Have Exploded And Collapsed Into Red Dwarfs. And That Makes You Seem Very Small, And If You Have Difficult Things In You Life It Is Nice To Think That They Are What Is Called Negligible, Which Means They Are So Small You Don’t Have To Take Them Into Account When You Are Calculating Something.

He Was Asking Too Many Questions And He Was Asking Them Too Quickly. They Were Stacking Up In My Head Like Loaves In The Factory Where Uncle Terry Works. The Factory Is A Bakery And He Operates The Slicing Machines. And Sometimes A Slicer Is Not Working Fast Enough But The Bread Keeps Coming And There Is A Blockage. I Sometimes Think Of My Mind As A Machine, But Not Always As A Bread-slicing Machine. It Makes It Easier To Explain To Other People What Is Going On Inside It.