When faced with the "what will the neighbours think if they see the garden looking like that" argument, I usually counter with "If they care that much, they can cut my lawn".

My latest rant is that the police probably would arrest you for not bothering about your garden. These days, the police find stuff like that easier to deal with than catching proper criminals.

There is an Iron Age hillfort overlooking my home village. Over the weekend, I went up there early in the morning (6am a few days before midsummer), and the sun was just in the right place to highlight what appeared to be earthen terraces cut into a nearby hillside.

I suspect that the inhavitants of the fort practiced terrace farming on the nearby south facing slope - it is too high up and windswept to grow corn, but barley and oats (the cereal crops of choice in Iron Age Britain; corn was imported by the Romans) are rather hardier.

Although the hillfort has been excacated by archeologists, they didn't have the resources to examine the surrounding area to work out where the locals would have tended their crops, although it would have been nearby for protection and south-facing for the sunlight.

FA, don't worry, the same thing will happen to you one day. You too will be telling your daughter to make sure she is in by 8pm, even when she is married and in her thirties

Ivory, that statement about people being too stupid to reproduce in the conventional manner is very disturbing...

Don't forget how angry or depressed they're going to get when the all-conquering unbeatable invincibles that are England go out of the World Cup at the hands of Ecuador.

Oops, I double posted, which just goes to show how ticked off I am with England's performance

I sacrificed the chance to watch the live coverage of England v Paraguay game to do some shopping. Normally the village I live in is crowded with tourists on a sunny Saturday in the summer. This time, everybody was either at home or in the pub watching the game

And after England's weak performance against the footballing giant that is Trinidad (whose players ply their trade with top European clubs like Wrexham and Falkirk), I am more convinced than ever that ENgland should have called up some Reading players.

How about a more political one, like what should be done with Tony Blair? Options could include dumping him in the middle of Baghdad on his own, so he can explain to the locals how much better off they are thanks to him and that they should 'draw the line' under things like the prisoner abuse scandals and lack of WMDs. What happens next would be more entertaining to watch than packing him off to the War Crimes Tribunal

ARe you sure there's a contradiction? Our species regards itself as pretty intelligent, even calling itself homo sapiens - wise man. We've also been killing and enslaving each other throughout recorded history, so therefore this must be the behaviour of an intelligent species

I'd like to give lemmings an honourable mention for tricking humans into thinking that they commit mass-suicide, which in fact they never do. That infamous footage showing them hurling themselves off a cliff into the ocean was actually showing a migration caused by population pressure. When lemmings migrate, they will cross small bodies of water if necessary; the lemmings responsible for the myth merely made a bad judgement call, mistaking a sea for a small pond.

That's true. They only operate in a particlar section of the jungle at a time as it means that the wildlife there has a chance to recover before the next sweep. This environmental planning means they are way more intelligent than Bush

Don't worry, I'm not one of those shallow types who is only interested in a girl if she has a good set of fins.

I rather respect ants. Their hives are highly complex societies, and they even wage war on each other and enslave each other; proof that they are intelligent beings. And who wouldn't be impressed at the sight of soldier ants scything through the jungle; creatures many times their size know they have to run for it or die.

But what happens when the world the fantasy writer portrays is just as bad as this one?

I'm more partial to history books; some people like a good horror novel, but I find that very few authors can come up with something that is as horrific as real human history.

Besides, fantasy writers have conspired to portray trolls in a negative way. We are the shambling brutes who can't do any real harm because we are always outwitted by some stupid hero in a loincloth who in reality would die of hypothermia long before reaching the troll bridge (damm tourists). Elves on the other hand ALWAYS get a good writeup. Those bastards go round kidnapping babies and musicians, and their idea of a good laugh is to trick some lone traveller into walking off a cliff

But you get to see plenty of wild animals, especially on a saturday night.

The fact that they made a film out of the Da Vinci Code, which I regard as the most badly written and badly thought out book in history. The author is even more overrated than Arthur C Clarke

Does spending three years living in Pontypridd count?

The climbing perch.

Any species of fish you can take 'walkies' has my respect. And it freaks out the dog owners