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" Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how. "

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" It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure. "

Craig Brown

Lonely

Old Friends

Football

" 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. "

" The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible. "

" As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip. "

" Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it. "

" You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety. "

" As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish. "

" Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable. "

" Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence. "

" Cleanliness is the scourge of art. "

" Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process. "

Craig Brown

Losing

Process

" The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common. "

" It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril. "

" 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. "

" Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite. "

" What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now. "

" The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house. "

" Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away. "

" Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish. "

" I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too. "

" Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued. "

" Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private. "

" More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences. "

" My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day. "

" When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read. "

" Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game. "

" Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one. "

" My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never. "

" 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.' "