Of course dictatorships work – for the people who hold the guns. Democracy doesn’t work – it’s a mess – but, as has been said before, it’s better than the alternative.

He drank in front of me, fully knowing that I was concerned over his alcohol consumption and that I had suggested that he should be abstinent. Interestingly, I think it was his wife who put him up to it. She didn’t like the prospect of being married to someone who might be labelled (by himself rather than by me) “alcoholic” and she was determined to prove (through her own personal logic) that it wasn’t true.

I need hope. We all do. It is the breath of life. The alternative – despair – is an absolute killer. But how do you find hope when the whole world is going to hell in a basket?

The answer is by looking at the whole world in a different way. Journalists present a world of despair because it ensures that we are anxious to read or watch their next instalment. Politicians present a world of despair so that we come to believe that only they can sort it out. The clergy present of world of despair because they promise an ultimate solution in the next life, provided that we do their bidding in this one.

I prefer to reject a despairing world and see a hopeful world and see what I myself can do in a small way to help to bring it into being. I know that life is difficult. I have difficulties of my own. I know that it is difficult to see light at the end of the tunnel. I myself am not sure even where the tunnel is at present. According to the news, the prospects for the world are not good – but I also see courage and determination, kindness and gentleness, creativity and enterprise and that gives me hope.

I had the time and I took it and I took a lot of care, using three separate NLP approaches, and then I put him into a trance. If he goes back to smoking again, I shall be disappointed and I shall have to think again. Although Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP, says that one should never expect to succeed in changing behaviour in just one session, I have my hopes. We shall see.

I sneezed repeatedly. I felt perfectly well. Clearly I had an allergy of some kind. I know that I have mild hay fever but this reaction did not happen every day. My guess was that it happened only when I had a particular brand of nutty muesli at breakfast. I therefore got out a bowl of this muesli and separated out all the nuts into a saucer. I ate the muesli. No reaction. I returned to eat the nuts, one type after another, so as to see precisely which was the culprit. The nuts had gone. I wondered where – until I observed a contented, and perhaps slightly larger, lady with whom I share my life. So much for science.

I like to warm myself up a bit before going to sleep. Irritatingly, the electric blanket didn’t work – until I discovered that the fault was human.

Since the demise of manufacturing and mining, much of employment in the north of England is in Government: monitoring the work of other people and going on training courses. Public sector pay and pensions (and sickness absence) know no bounds.

As a country, we can’t survive on that, particularly now that the City of London, the engine room of our service economy, is faltering. Zanu Labour, particularly under the influence of Gordon Brown, first as Chancellor and now as Prime Minister, is destroying us. Yet no one man can really do that on his own: it is the socialist ideas that are wrong.

The Prime Minister continues to believe that he can offer all sorts of financial benefits to the populus, that the financial catastrophe originated in America and really had nothing to do with him, and that we can preserve all the wonders (disasters) of The Welfare State merely by making things more regulated (controlled). From the look of the opinion polls, which give the Conservative Party a smaller lead than previously, it would appear that voters are becoming seduced by the Prime Minister’s denial of reality. God help us all.

I like Europeans in general and I like Americans, Asians, Africans and all sorts of people and I like the concept of Free Trade. However, the concept of Europe as a political entity does not attract me. I would rather that the UK became an additional state of the United States of America, with whom I feel I have more in common in terms of the philosophical approach of a “can do” society. Best of all, I would like to stay as we are, an island off the coast of the rest of Europe, and be as free and independent as we can be. Being part of a European super-state does not attract me. I forsee even greater regulation, authoritarianism and corruption.

He believes that meat is contaminated by the pain and fear of the animal at the time of its death and that this spiritual and chemical contamination is transmitted to those who eat the flesh. I am not sure of the science of that but I understand the spiritual concept. Also I may have some understanding of his personal situation when I learned that his father was a butcher. I once visited an abattoir and the image has remained with me ever since. However, I do not understand his further suggestion that I should give up onions and garlic. As someone with an eating disorder, I am reluctant to extend the basic principles of abstinence (from sugar and white flour) that have stood me in good stead for the last twenty five years. I am keen to continue to follow a spiritual path, as best I can, but I am not sure that vegetarianism would be the best route for me.