Blotto, stinking, caned, sloshed, smashed, sozzled, pissed; we’ve almost as many words for getting drunk as we do for rain.

Flowers are a terrible metaphor for love. How did they become so powerful?

Since long before Aesop, stories have been used as warnings when the clear threat is simply not enough.

As soon as you’re old enough to pay tax, idealism is one of those things you realise you can’t afford anymore. Nice ideas like world peace, universal happiness or every day a good-hair-day, gradually seem less achievable.

Break out the Prozac, uncork the gin, curse Gillette for the invention of the safety razor; the year’s most wretched day returns.

The ‘Occupy The-Moral-High-Ground’ camp by St Paul’s protests the greed of the “1%” of the population who possess an astonishingly disproportionate amount of this country’s wealth. But then here, in the borough with the highest property values in Britain you might ask: Is that us? Are we that “1%”?

‘Stay foolish. Stay hungry.’ As if either true foolishness or hunger were a choice; as if anybody who attended Stanford, or could afford Jobs’ products, or even access tweets, could have ever known real hunger beyond day two of the Dukan Diet.

What has made Brown such a paragon for modern magicians is not his effects which, from a conjurer’s point of view, are certainly no more extraordinary than an Annemann or Thurston, but the way he dresses them in the irresistibly credible and contemporary beliefs that we hold to be self-evident.

To help Halloween become a less foreign event there are six basic rules I’ve worked out from years trudging around with my own children…

Whoever coined the fantasy school-gate phrase “Yummy Mummy” could only have been there for the afternoon pick-up. In the cold light of the eight a.m. drop they look just about credible, but far from edible. The real competition is for the Fab Dad title.