Donald looked through his magnifying glass and pondered long and hard. The lens had no power source, and yet it allowed him to zoom in on reality. It seemed that he was swapping field-of-view for better detail, and that this didn't cost anything.

So Donald designed a similar device. It needed no power, was easily constructed, and let the user to exchange the bigger picture for a fantastically detailed close up of... time.

Donald immersed himself in the minutiae of a minute, and it lasted an entire day. The things he saw... the things we miss by going so fast.

He built a bigger version, and put it in his garden. It had a lock, so his kids couldn't gain access. One day the key fell from the lock as he entered. He watched his wife come across the lawn to free him.

He starved to death waiting.

It had been a difficult journey from one side of the lounge to the other. I'd negotiated a danger zone occupied by various Thunderbird machines, and sidestepped the scene of Captain Scarlet's latest demise. I'd managed not to slip on the moist carpet where Stingray had briefly operated before being returned to the bath, and tiptoed carefully through the ranks of tank engines and troublesome trucks awaiting their allotted track time. It needed a long step to avoid the dozen or so Lego robots locked in deadly combat, and a short hop to dodge the massed construction vehicles busily erecting a tower of wooden blocks.

I'd made it... but forgotten my glasses, and in my annoyance I miscalculated.

Crunch.

A small face emerged from this sea of plastic.

"Dad, you've broken a crash barrier - again."

"I'll get glue." I said, and he rolled his eyes to heaven.

Andrew watched his grandfather through the window. The old man shuffled to his bedside cupboard and opened a draw, pulling out an envelope. Granddad looked inside, but it was empty. The usual contents, a single sheet of paper, was now in the Andrew's back pocket. The boy quietly moved away, smiling.

Andrew despised his grandfather. He wanted him gone from the family home. Every week the old man's behaviour got worse, every week his mother very nearly lost her temper and threw him out, but every week he managed a miraculous change of character, and was somehow saved from banishment.

Grandfather's memory was bad, and Andrew had discovered his secret, a crib sheet containing reminders of what not to do. Andrew read as the flames devoured the page.

"Don't spit in the house." "Don't pee on the loo seat." "Don't fart in the kitchen." "Don't..."

The motorway was busy, the rain fell, I needed to concentrate, but there was an annoying noise coming from the car. It was my mother. With her immense experience of driving (never sat behind a steering wheel) and her extensive knowledge of local roads (never been anywhere) she was explaining how badly I was driving, and how it would have been much better if we'd gone a different way. I stayed quiet... as, eventually, she usually ran out of steam. But today she had hit a purple patch, moving on from my motoring shortcomings to other aspects of my miserable life. My dodgy job. My poor taste in women. The appalling way I was bringing up my child. I pulled over onto the hard shoulder, grabbed my coat, left the car and started to climb the embankment. From the top I could see my mother was still talking.

"Move." "Why should I?" "Because you're in my way." "No. I'm in the way of your camera." "So move." "Make me."

As the policeman stepped towards me I raised a small camera and clicked. The flash surprised him and he stepped back.

"I can do you for obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty." "OK. Do it then. You have all the witnesses you'll need, huh?"

Behind me a threatening murmur swept through the crowd gathered for this showdown. The policeman had emerged from the rear doors of his speed-camera transit van, after several hours of muffled gleeful laughter had been heard from within. This was a man who enjoyed his work.

Everyone in the crowd reached inside their jackets and handbags. All took aim. And in a flurry of camera flashes, the PC fled back to his van.

"Let me get this right, Mrs. Parker. Your husband here awoke every morning of his life in an absolutely foul temper?"

"Yes Doctor."

"And the reason for his bad mood was that he dreamt the same dream every night, and yet again he’d been interrupted at a vital moment?"

"Yes."

"And in this dream he was searching for a particular room, either in an unfamiliar house or a shopping centre or wherever. And just as he was about to find the room, he awoke?"

"As I understand it, yes."

"So you think the coma we now find him in is because during his last night of real sleep he'd finally made it to the room, and he's not coming back?"

"I believe so."

"And what do you think is in the room, Mrs. Parker?"

"I rather hope it's me, Doctor - with a gun."

I walked into the gents, and there's this dodgy character in there jabbering away on a cell-phone. He sees me, stops talking, climbs up on a washbasin, and he's out through the window. Odd.

I go back to the table and I start to tell my brother about this. He says, never mind that, have you seen who's over there? All my family are craning their necks, trying to see. Who? I say. It's Him. No. Yes. And it was.

Mostly hidden behind a wall of burly minders was Saddam himself. I couldn't believe it. I guess he has to eat somewhere.

Suddenly, one of his men bursts through the door, yells to his mates and the whole lot up sticks and run for the exit.

Overhead there was the sound of a jet. No panic, the Americans weren't bombing civilian areas. But then, what exactly is that noise…?

I was sitting in the fast lane of the M6, on Boxing day. Ahead lay a green and pleasant vista ruined by six lanes of tarmac inhabited by hundreds of motionless vehicles. There was a Volvo estate in front of me. It had a rear facing child seat at the back, with a rear facing child in it. There he was, cut off from the rest of his family by luggage, working his way through his Christmas presents. He tugged at a robot and it ended up as a truck. He sketched on a pad and then erased it. He read a book. He concentrated hard on a hand-held game. He looked out of the rear window now and again, though he didn't seem to see me, lost in his own world. I wished I was him. I want another go. I want to have no worries, just toys.

My four-year-old son had shown scant interest in the toy Space Shuttle I'd bought him, that was until the real Shuttle burnt up. We watched the news reports together.

It didn't take him long to question what had happened to the crew, and I explained that they would not have survived.

The next news to get his attention was the war in Iraq. The initial excitement was quickly tainted by the reality of injury and death. "Why?" came up a lot in his enquiries.

I turned around one afternoon to see him red eyed and distressed. "I don't want to die," he sobbed, pathetically. I did a lot of explaining about just how long it would be before this became a real issue for him.

"I don't want to die," he repeated. "Nobody does," I responded.

The news rolled on with a story about voluntary euthanasia.

You can't win.

Not many people know that cows can get across cattle grids. They've been doing it for years, we've just not noticed.

They do it on moonlit nights. It's quite easy, and if a cow could grin, when it got to the other side, it would. They just stand parallel to the grid, and fall over onto it, sideways. Cattle grids usually measure just less than twice the height of a cow.

Some very skilful cows can judge the roll so precisely that their momentum sets them back upright again on the other side. Others end up in a heap, but on the other side, none the less.

If there's a bull around he will always watch these displays of agility with great interest. To a bull, seeing those udders flying gracefully through the air is a really big deal.

Bulls can't join in, as their horns get in the way.