I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.
Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that’s hard to explain.
If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?
All this health and safety talk is just killing me.
The only person to ever look good in the back of a 4-seater convertible was Adolf Hitler.
Nothing can prepare you for the yawning chasm of time that passes in Canada before the healthcare system actually does any healthcare.
You take out an injunction against somebody or some organisation and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the Internet. It’s pointless.
When I was 16, I wanted to look like Lord Byron. It’s not really a haircut so much as a hair-not-cut, but I’ve never changed it. It’s a bit Byron, a bit Don Juan DeMarco and other things that I aspire to be.
The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian.
I’m not capable of having an affair. You can ask my wife. I’m not physically capable.
I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the Guardian hating me.
Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig.
Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely, or you don’t, in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition.
Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf.
This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.
Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.
I am aware, of course, that many men do hate the sight of their wife and children. Doctors even have a name for these people: ‘anglers’.
I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it’s flying; the next it’s tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face.
Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.
I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it here again, now. Nothing brilliant has ever resulted from a meeting.
The next day I called my neighbouring farmers to say I was going to have a coronary, and they all had the same piece of advice. I had to accept whatever happens, because that’s farming. They also said I had to be patient, which is not possible. I can’t be patient. It’s not in my DNA. It’s a bit like telling Nicholas Witchell he has to be a Moroccan cage fighter.