“Celebrity farmer. Now there's a phrase that should be an oxymoron. The...” — John Lanchester Quote

Celebrity farmer. Now there's a phrase that should be an oxymoron. There are farmers on both sides of my family, and I can attest that the overlap between the way farmers live, work and think, and celebrity culture, is exactly 0%.

When I first travelled to New York in 1982 on a summer holiday as a student, I remember thinking how exciting it was, how energising it felt, and also how it felt dangerous - it was a place where you could make a wrong turn, either geographically or just in a human interaction, and suddenly find yourself in trouble.

Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it.

Nobody in the developing world is going to take, as an answer to their aspirations, the developed world's reply: 'Sorry, you can't; we've already used it all up.' To earn the right to look the developing world in the eye and start this conversation, we need a reassessment of how we live and what we want.

I'm on the sockless and un-sockless teams. I'm on both sides.

A lot of my family on both sides have worked in education and nursing, and my grandmother was a nurse; my sister is a nurse, and her - my other sister's daughter is going into nursing. There's a lot of that in the family.

I don't think you can complain about getting to the NFC Championship Game. But if you sit there and say your goal is to win a championship, and then you don't, and then you still go on and say what a great of a year and a team you were, then you're kind of talking out of both sides of your mouth.

My wife Helen is Cornish and both sides of her family are Cornish going back at least a dozen generations. And I envy that and desperately want it for my children.