Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame very pretty often hot and fierce but still only light and flickering. As love grows older our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals deep-burning and unquenchable.

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us we often find that it is those who instead of giving advice solutions or cures have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.

Where globalization means as it so often does that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

I am but one member of a vast team made up of many organizations officials thousands of scientists and millions of farmers - mostly small and humble - who for many years have been fighting a quiet oftentimes losing war on the food production front.

Women oftentimes are the ones making those economic decisions sitting around the kitchen table and trying to figure out how to pay for rising gas prices or food prices or the health insurance costs. And I think that they see where they expect their leaders in Congress to also make those tough decisions.

You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory so ultimately it is all about taste.

The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them though as I'm usually on the run.