If anyone feels like inviting me to a dinner party, rest assured I’ll be casually introducing the word "pericarp" into the conversation

"If you were a pretentious country teenager in a house without a VCR, there was nowhere else to watch this stuff. Watching quare/slow films was one of the reasons for going to college."

"Just being in messy places where quiet genius takes place makes my soul sing"

"There is no age limit officially, but if the baby is getting very mobile then the parent can’t really relax, because a waddler will be off out to the lounge watching The Chase with a load of oul' lads."

"Between cookies and the endless ads that appear on pages, paging the normal internet now has become as frustrating as the days of dial up and Netscape loading the page one per cent at a time."

If there’s thunder and lightning, the electricity can force three oxygen atoms together to form ozone which has a sharp fresh smell

"The podcast is The Rest is History and they are 480 episodes in. And over the last 10 months I have caught up. 480 hours. 400 if you listen at 1.2 speed. That’s more time than I’ve spent with my children..."

Once you go tackling an invasive species, you realise just why it’s so successful

"Yes, of course I’d be useless in the woods. I’d drop the matches on the way out the door, begging to be fed from the first house I see in the woods only to find it’s inhabited by cannibals..."

We are out the other end of the Olympics. (And in the case of the Seine swimmers, the Olympics is out the other end of them.) The next stage is What Can We Learn From the Olympics For Life?