1. Pity poor washed-up me: "Now I have a civil partner I find myself under pressure to upgrade travel arrangements. I’ve never minded sharing cabins with strangers – you meet interesting people – but I see his point"

2. Come on, Dave. Don’t forget to woo your lumpentoriat: "If a party whose very name rejoices in the adjective “conservative” cannot find language that stitches together a respect for existing and familiar institutions with a reluctance to turn them into a doctrine and replicate them in unfamiliar situations, then it needs new speechwriters"

3. I want to join those who underestimate Mr Brown: "I was wrong about Saddam Hussein’s hidden Weapons of Mass Destruction. They never existed. We all talked ourselves into believing that there was something massive beneath the dry and dusty surface but when we got there the cupboard was empty. I am not going to make the same mistake about Gordon Brown"

4. Yes, America's my friend. Or is it? Suddenly I'm not sure: “What was your Kronstadt?” became a code phrase to find the point at which a European socialist or communist tipped from being a Soviet sympathiser. I am not comparing Guantanamo with Gulag, or America with the Soviet Union — it’s nothing like as bad as that. But if Washington does get us into a war with Iran, that will be my Kronstadt moment."

5. The llamas are right. Britain should shut for winter: "Why is Great Britain inhabited? I realise it’s habitable — but so is Siberia, and so, one day, will Mars be. Why, however, would humans choose to winter in Britain?"

6. I should welcome the Baker report. So why do I feel sick? "The term realpolitik has become a cliché in media treatment of the ISG report this week but the irony is this: Baker’s conclusions are anything but realistic: they represent unrealism of the most fanciful kind. His route map is to La-la Land. He knows it"

7. The terrorist virus is no lightweight matter. We must contain its spread: "So far from pooh-poohing news of the growing number of delusional or incompetent terrorist conspirators and conspiracies in Britain, we should understand that a rapid expansion in the volume of “aspirational” terrorism is likely, in time, to be a penumbra at whose centre will be a slimmer, darker shadow, a small number of real terrorists"

8. A perfect marriage: no tacky invite, no music, no video, no list and no dancing: "WHERE WAS I when this column started? Ah yes, in the check-in queue at Barcelona airport. Trring-trring — my mobile phone. I’d better take this last call, I thought, before escaping Europe, and attention. “Hello?” “Hello. This is the Daily Mail. And we think congratulations are in order...”

9. For a footballer to wear a sarong and pink nail varnish took courage: "I detest neckties. For more than a century these pointless things have exerted a malign stranglehold on male apparel and necks. Few other stylistic nuisances can have persisted so long, essentially unchanged, during the past thousand years"

10. If you want hair as fluffy as mine, the solution is staring you in the face: "Pointing out that cats and monkeys never use shampoo yet do not seem to suffer from oily fur, I suggested that if humans, too, stopped stripping our hair of natural oils, our scalps might stop pumping them out. I promised readers I would try this. Maybe they thought I was joking"

11. Suicide is not painless, but it can be brave, right and rational: "Is suicide not the greatest of all tokens of the primacy of the human will? How shall a man ever demonstrate with more finality that he is the captain of his soul, the master of his ship, than by taking it by his own choice on to the rocks?"

12. I rode the Peruvian switchback with a bunch of trainspotters: "For railway enthusiasts there are no balance sheets and only one bottom line: Heaven is a destination to be approached along an iron road"

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