You're either better or you're worse, you're either richer or you're poorer, you're either sick or you're healthy. There are no other options. If you need some words there you could say 'in any circumstances'. But really, you don't need to say anything at all. 'Till death us do part' kind of has it sewn up.

The glamour's off. Almost any question you ask can be answered. It's only the questions that you didn't know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.

Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) records that: The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita [gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth.

Funny chap, Jesus. First, it's a little strange to assert that a piece of bread is your body. If you or I tried that we wouldn't be believed. We certainly wouldn't be allowed to run a bakery. Yet, given that Jesus was the son of God (this point has occasionally been disputed by people who will burn for ever in God's loving torment), we'll just have to take him at his word.

adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.

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When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them.

Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.

It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again. A few years ago, book covers could be rather drab affairs: the title and the author's name printed over a stock photograph of something Vaguely Relevant. If you wanted to read it, you had to take it as it was. Whereas now, in these new and glorious days when the margins on physical are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven't been this pretty for at least a century.