Recently a dramatically striking picture was published of a young Afghan girl looking firmly into the camera lens. She had most remarkable eyes. There was something particularly notable about her pupils.

Life can be extraordinarily unfair at times. Two members of my extended family are in medical difficulty at present. One was told that he had a one-in-a-hundred chance of a particular surgical complication and, of course, he got it. The other was told that her treatment was working – until it didn’t.

He is committed to parliamentary reform but, at the same time, knowledgeable and respectful of parliamentary tradition. He could be rather good, despite his facetious election by the Labour Party majority in the House of Commons. I doubt that he will sing their tune now – he doesn’t need to.

He gave so much. That should be his epitaph – nothing else.

Terry Pratchett’s novel, “Nation”, is not in the Discworld series. It is a straight adventure story and love story. Very soon I was enthralled by it. I read it straight through in one day and night. It was very good for me to be so totally absorbed by it that I put all current difficulties aside.

But what a man! Battling against Alzheimer’s disease, this could be his last novel, although I hope not. Yet I remember that Iris Murdoch and Bernard Levin, both magnificent writers, had to stop writing because of Alzheimer’s disease. Life can be extraordinarily selectively cruel at times.

“Nation” is a story of what a nation really is and what it takes to create and defend one. “A personal philosophy” could be an alternative title. Terry Pratchett certainly has that and I am much the richer from him illustrating it in his books.

Estate agents are catching a cold. People tend not to weep for estate agents but I do. I think they do an excellent piece of work. They don’t deserve the blame when their clients make stupid decisions. They themselves don’t determine the price of a property – that is determined by the other client. They work hard and they have minimal security – and they often deal with clients from hell, every one of whom believes that he or she knows more about the profession than they do. Being the director of a treatment centre wasn’t much different in that respect.

This particular sleeping tablet got a name as “The Date Rape Pill”. It should have been called “ The Rape Assisted Pill”. It is used primarily by strangers rather than by people with whom the girl made a date.

I am concerned for people who take it willingly. It is a horrid drug. It shouldn’t be prescribed at all but it can be bought on the Internet and it causes a dreadful addiction. Prescription drug addiction really is the very devil.

They don’t really have a daughter: she is a thirty two year old woman. Nobody has a daughter aged thirty two. Her parents very much resented me saying that but the daughter herself was very happy to hear it. However, she now has to live up to the expectation of independence.

Terry Pratchett, my very favourite writer, gave £1 million to research into Alzheimer’s disease. from which he himself suffers. I hope the researchers spend the money wisely and focus their attention on doing things that would be beneficial to their patients rather than to their own kudos, as can happen distressingly frequently in the research world.

I find myself watching television for two opposite reasons: there is a part of me that wants to escape from reality and another strange part of me that wants to be terrified by it.