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You know that joke, “how do you know when someone has an iPad? Because they tell you”? This adapts very well to the Take That tax avoider. How do you know how Gary Barlow lost five stone? Because he tells you. In precis, he realised, after years of trial and error, “that he doesn’t have the kind of body that allows him to eat whatever he likes” and thereafter, cut out sugar, alcohol, any solids at all after 2pm, and refined carbohydrates. I know! As if he couldn’t get any more charismatic.

Zoe Williams

When 12 [75 years ago] I was out working as a delivery boy for the local grocer. Then I got caught delivering tomatoes by the man from the school board and my parents were taken to court. The summons said I had been working under age “delivering vegetables”. My solicitor pointed out that tomatoes were a fruit and the case was dismissed. I still use the same firm of solicitors today.

‘It is demonstrably true,’ he would say, ‘that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose. Observe how noses were made to bear spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Legs are evidently devised to be clad in breeches, and breeches we have. Stones were formed in such a way that they can be hewn and made into castles, and so His Lordship has a very beautiful castle. The greatest baron in the province must be the best lodged. And since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who have argued that all is well have been talking nonsense. They should have said that all is for the best.’

Candide

Book I’ve only read one book in the last seven years. It’s called Walter the Farting Dog. My fiancee gave it to me.
Film The Third Man, no question.
TV show Has to be Fawlty Towers.
Shop I don’t like shops.
Song Five Little Miles from San Berdoo. Jane Russell sang it in a movie. It’s the most stupid song ever.
View From my bedroom. On the north side you see the garden, which we floodlight with 168 floodlights, and on the other side you see Jimmy Page’s house, which I’ve also floodlit. If he objects, I’ll turn it off.
Place to go on holiday The Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda, which was Mussolini’s last home before he left it and got shot.
Restaurant The River Café.
Meal A good old English fry-up: fried bread, fried eggs, sausages, tomatoes, black pudding. Michel Blanc at Le Manoir does a very good English fry-up, and he’s French.

Ceil and I gossip in English while, a few trees away, Erminio and his brother-in-law banter in Veronese dialect, laughing constantly.

It’s amazing what poverty-enforced boredom can do for productivity.