Then all the world and his dog either rang or turned up. - Michael Palin

The bird life, was, as ever, of great interest to ship’s surgeon McCormick. On seeing hovering over the ship what he believed to be a new species of Lestris, or Arctic Yager, described by Audubon, the great American bird illustrator, as an ‘indefatigable teaser of the smaller gulls’, he took a pot-shot at it. His shot failed to despatch the bird cleanly and, after descending near the deck, it recovered and flew away with one leg broken. McCormick, unusually, felt compelled to justify himself: ‘For notwithstanding that my duties as ornithologist compel me to take the lives of these most beautiful and interesting creatures . . . I never do so without a sharp sting of pain and qualm of conscience, so fond am I of all the feathered race.’ So fond, indeed, that on the same night he recorded that ‘Between midnight and one a.m. I succeeded in adding two more of the elegant white petrel to my collection, one falling dead on the quarter-deck and the other on the gun-room skylight . . . a third I shot . . . fell overboard into the sea.

You can't get a suit of armour and a rubber chicken just like that. You have to plan ahead.

Standards of food and television are appallingly low, and yet there are lots of both. Yet the standards of kindliness and consideration amongst the people are high – though they are sometimes made fools of by their over-sufficiency. See the size of so many over-fed citizens of all ages. Human incarnations of the economy of waste.