Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uu… - Derren Brown

Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, it’s not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after you’ve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.

Just talking about the illogicality behind so many of these systems: Tarot cards, which are obviously very, very popular. The deck is mixed and you choose a number of cards, they’re laid out and then your fortune and fate is read from them. Of course, the interesting conundrum there is that if you did the same thing five minutes later you’d pick out very different cards so presumably your fate and the reading would be necessarily very different if it’s relying on those cards. Five minutes later it would be completely different and when there have been questions about this the answer is ‘oh, that’s because your fate changes from minute to minute’. But then you have to think, presumably, to get a Tarot reading you’d have to constantly be having a Tarot reading over and over again in order to know what the accurate situation is, if it constantly changes from minute to minute.

I have had no formal training in painting: I gave up Art A level because I was sick of drawing peppers.