“The words 'mainly in America' translated to me as 'this is bollocks' and I sat back in my chair with a sigh.”

“I sat down on the sofa, surrounded by years of coffee rings and sandwich stains. If the police ever did a DNA test on this sofa, it would be ninety per cent disappointment.”

“Because it is illegal to talk to a stranger on a train, it can sometimes be confusing when someone stands on your foot or hits you with their briefcase and then fails to say sorry. Which is why I have decided to carry an air horn with me at all times, and when someone stands on my foot I will set it off in their face and then go back to reading my paper. I imagine this will make people want to avoid standing on my feet, but if I've paid good money for the air horn, I'll want to use it, so I'll wear massive clown-shoes while travelling. I'll also wear a red nose and a wig. Essentially, I really want to get into clowning.”

“My wife said to me recently that she hates couples who finish each other's sentences for them. I agreed that it was annoying, but it made me think that perhaps we were missing out on something, so now every time she says anything, I say 'full stop' at the end. I have been doing it for a full week now, and it has really kept the romance alive.”

“I’m not one of those guys who can hear a band and immediately cite their influences and probable heroes. There are guys like that out there. Play them the first drumbeat and they’ll start banging on about Led Zeppelin or Limp Bizkit or how everything can be traced back to the man who wrote the Birdie Song. Dev can do it with videogames. He can take one look at a game and tell you what it’s trying to be, where it got the idea, what it’s been crossed with and how well it’s done, but I just can’t. Because I’m the other sort of person. A Type 2. One that judges everything on its own merits. Not because it’s the right and just and fair thing to do, but because there’s something about me that doesn’t quite have that passion. That need for peripheral knowledge. I like a little of everything; I don’t need it all. It can make conversations with the Type 1s a little strained. A Type 1 will have all his opinions ready to go and probably alphabetised before he even gets near you. A Type 2 will then shrink behind his sandwich.”

“If I was going to act irresponsibly, the least I could do was be responsible for it.”

“This might just be two people in a queue, but this has become a mighty battle of wills - a war between all that is right and all that is wrong - and it is I and I alone standing at the gates between one minor slight in the queue-munity, and outright supermarket-based anarchy. In many ways, I am doing this for you.”