CRAIG BROWN

Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.

My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.

As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish.

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.

Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.

Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.

There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.

Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.

Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.

For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.

When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.

The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.

As life goes on, we accrue more and more loseable objects. Providence dictates that objects that are too large to lose, such as houses, always come with tiny little keys, specially designed to give you the slip.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.

The first thing I hear when I wake up is the sea, which is so close to our house that its reflections from the sun dapple our bedroom ceiling.

Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.

What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.

Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process.

It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.

More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.

My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.