What goes up must come down. That is the way of the world. However, what comes down must go up again. That’s also the way of the world – but telling it to the banks is another matter altogether.

In the Seventeenth Century, my family were immigrants. I myself was born in India and I have an Indian birth certificate. I get a bit nervous when political parties talk about immigrants in disparaging terms because I could finish up being deported. With my views on the European Community, I doubt that any European country would want me. I suppose I would have to go back to India. No harm in that.

There comes a time in a patient’s recovery when professionally guided (as opposed to Anonymous Fellowship supported) treatment should be complete. I see no value in getting patients to have session after session of continuing psychotherapeutic intervention. The only thing that this achieves is to pay the rent of the therapist.

Wherever she goes for treatment, she runs away. I think she likes running away – but I don’t think she is going to get well that way.

I could not work out why I never managed to get through a particular one of Milton Erickson’s audio tapes on hypnotherapy. I couldn’t remember for the life of me what it was that he had said – until I recognised this particular instruction. Every time I told myself to remember, I forgot: exactly as ordered!

The officials asked me what I had learned. I told them straight: I don’t want anything to do with them.

When this term is used after an air crash, I always think of the pilot’s family. Do people honestly imagine that he would thoughtlessly make a mistake in which he lost his own life and killed his crew and passengers? “Pilot mishap” might be softer and more understanding. The blame culture is too savage.

She is less than half my age but she has lost a distressingly large number of members of her family – and she doesn’t even live in a war zone.

Fifty years on from Fidel Castro’s takeover and the political embodiment of his ideas (and those of Che Guevara, Mao, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in their spheres of influence), Cuba is still a disaster. To be against something is easy. The real challenge is to create something functional and positive and these revolutionaries totally failed to do that.

Last Christmas there was a very sad story of a mother who, rather than buy presents for her children, spent her last money on a lottery ticket – and won a million. Sad? Yes of course it was. How much more had she spent on lottery tickets prior to that win? How many more people were subsequently encouraged to spend money on an incredibly low chance of return on investment rather than on simple presents or even food for their families? The popular press were extremely irresponsible in their treatment of this story as a happy event, rather than a sad one.