The millions who watch 'Downton Abbey' do so neither relating to the Granthams nor hating them. It's an amused enjoyment of spectacle.
If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.
A long time ago, my grandfather used to play blackjack with me, when I was very small, and I quite enjoyed that.
Casino games such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat, slot machines and so on, are stacked in favour of the house.
Driving a car is no longer about zooming down clear lanes, the joy and freedom of the road flowing through your hair like a fine westerly breeze. It's about solid traffic, petrol fumes, spy cameras, eco-guilt, and simultaneous social media.
Makeup is only fun if it's occasional and capricious - just like it's a treat to have an empty day ahead, but it wouldn't be if you were doing 20 years in Parkhurst.
I'm familiar with that magical mindset during sporting competition where one feels completely zoned in on what's happening. There are occasional nights in poker when the mists have cleared, and I just know what my opponents' cards are. Everything at the table is slow, loud, and easy. The rest of the world is silent.
Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.
People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.
The truth is, I feel sorry for the Old Etonians. Everybody should be judged on his or her own merits. Assuming that toffs are 'out of touch' is more modern and fashionable than assuming they have a 'natural fitness for government,' but it's no fairer.
Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.
The Highway Code can't be that difficult to understand, and yet my brain seems to treat it as a set of nuclear fission instructions in Old Japanese.
I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.
You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.
In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.
Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly.
When I was at school, I loved maths and read lots of books and was horrified at the idea of having a boyfriend... I was probably a nerd, but then, it was a negative term.
Anyone who's tuned in to the House of Commons TV coverage knows the benches are often empty. I like that. I'm a big fan of political transparency. It's good for us to know which debates the MPs consider important enough to show up for, and which not.
I don't quite comprehend what Kim Kardashian is, where she came from, or why we talk about her.
I'm too short-sighted, too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses.
