It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.
A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law.
Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.
If you're not making some mistakes, it probably means you're not trying hard enough.
There is a strong link between the following three things: exporting, manufacturing and the degree of saving by the population. It's complicated, but if the population doesn't save, the economy will not tend to export as much, and if it doesn't export as much, it won't manufacture enough.
I don't particularly like going on about being gay or making a big thing about it, but I think it's a bit of a pain to be secretive about it.
For industry to settle in a country, you first need electricity; for electricity, you need some trained workers; for trained workers, you need some schools; for schools you need some money; for money, you need some industry.
But sometimes it's good to dare yourself to do the unthinkable. And rather than stand in front of an audience with no clothes on, I decided to have a go at stand-up comedy.
The two questions that anyone ever asks me are: 'Are house prices going to go down?' and 'Is it a good time to fix my mortgage rate?'
Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects - perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.
The key thing about me is that I'm really not very interesting.
Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.
Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.
As it happens, I have personally been something of an enthusiast for the London Olympic games, mainly on the grounds a) that a bit of wasteland will be made nice and b) that it tends to make everybody happy that their country should be the centre of world attention for a couple of weeks in their life.
Art can help a town by attracting a certain Bohemian population that adds life to the bars, character to the streets and a buzz to the name. Employers may then follow. But art can't do much if every town does it. There aren't enough Bohemians.
For years, we've grown dependant on American consumers as the world's spenders of last resort. They've kept Europe out of recession, allowed China to industrialise, and prevented global deflation. But at the same time, they've not been looking after their own futures.
It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.
Some people harbour an awkward clash of feelings - homosexual attraction on the one hand and shame or embarrassment about that attraction on the other. It is well known that the mind struggles to sustain conflicting views.
I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited, they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place, a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.
One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there's a 'made in Germany' label on it - they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.
Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass.
I don't keep it secret that I live with my partner Gio. I'm very proud of my gayness. But there is lots I wouldn't want the press to write about me... it is a matter of regret that being gay is the most interesting thing about me.
It doesn't annoy me but I think of myself as a presenter who is gay, rather than a gay presenter. It's a subtle distinction, but that's how I view it.
Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.
Even the 'Today' programme involves a balance between the worthy-but-heavy items with the worthless-but-entertainingly-light ones.
