Ten by ten, or a handy guide to living without worry

Ten Things You Should Always Avoid Doing

Taking the last chocolate in the box

Taking home that wine that seemed so great on holiday

Eating any sausages served in any hotel breakfast

Drinking any white wine served in a pub

Resorting to any medicine in your bathroom cupboard that hasn't been bought in the past week

Reading any publications that claim to be "Lifestyle Magazines"

Putting on yesterday's shirt in the fond hope that it will probably last one more day before washing

Getting in touch with those people you met on holiday

Thinking that whatever you are doing is unobserved

Ten Words Which Are Only Seen Written Down And Never Heard In Conversation

Accidie

Anomie

Discrete

Asafoetida

Phatic

Limn

Maffick

Steatopgyic

Tsk Tsk

Sic

Ten Things We Give To People When We Can't Think Of Anything To Give to Them

Devices for pulling gum boots off with

A bottle of sparkling wine

Book tokens

Magazine subscriptions

Chocolates

Michael Palin's latest book

Small amounts of money

Home-made jars of chutney

Flowers

That thing we were given by someone last Christmas which we could never find a use for

Ten words Ruined By Overuse in Advertising

Pedigree

Vintage

Premium

Quality

Super

Heritage

Prime

Unique

Cleanse

Economy

Ten Phrases That Indicate That Somebody Is About To Evade The Question They Have Just Been Asked

"Well ... "

"That's a fair question..."

"Let me put it this way ..."

"I think what we should be asking ourselves is this ..."

"What we have always said is this ..."

"Look ..."

"That's an interesting question."

"Absolutely. On the other hand. ..."

"Gosh - isn't that a green woodpecker over there?"

"Heavens - is that the time?"

Ten Things That Got Misplaced

The Lost Chord

Paradise Lost

One of Our Spies

My Heart (in San Francisco)

The Lost Tribe of Israel

The Land that Time forgot

The Lost Boys

Absent Friends

The Unknown Soldier

Beethoven's Penny

Ten Bisexual Names, Equally Available to Both Men and Women

Vivian

Shirley

Lesley

Hilary

Robin

Francis

Pat

Kim

Laurie

Jerry

Ten Foreign Words Sprinkled In Tedious Conversations The Same Way As Grated Chocolate Is Sprinkled on Fake Capuccino Coffee

Genre

Noir

Zeitgeist

Gestalt

Auteur

Chutzpah

Angst

Kafkaesque

Gemutlichkeit

Omerta

Ten Things That We Believe In Because They Have Been Given A Name Though They Probably Don't Exist

Post-modernism

New Labour

John Major's Classless Society

The Northern Ireland Peace Process

The Gay Community

The British Film Industry

Informed Opinion

The Chattering Classes

Peace-loving Nations

Life After Death

Ten Meanings For Which There Is No Word

Nail clippings which have become so embedded in your jersey that they are now part of its texture

To ascribe erroneously to Dorothy Parker

The act of talking to a parrot without getting an answer

A fake baguette made with dull English flour

The act of flashing your headlights at cars coming the other way to indicate that there is a police speed trap round the corner

The act of following the course of a disused railway with your eye as you drive along a motorway

The empty plate which the waiter removes from your place as you sit down in a restaurant

A food stain which is exactly the same colour as the garment it is on

An innate inability to locate Radio 5 on the dial

The act of trying to read the front pages of every other newspaper in a newsagents while you are buying your own paper.