Learn from the past. Go on, there's loads of it!

Despite my frankly idyllic lifestyle, I find myself perturbed that I may be missing out on some of the more prosaic yet welcome aspects of a normal life. Specifically relationships. I see my friends all pairing off as they get older - engaged, married, murder-suicide. That kind of thing.

Withers is always here of course; and most of the time he is in good spirits and therefore good company, barring the occasional apoplectic raving about his dwarven hermaphrodite daughter and her unseemly love of wearing monocles in entirely the wrong orifices. But helpmeet, companion and oft-time card table that he is, he's still no substitute for the love of a good woman.

So to comfort myself in moments of solitude and loneliness I have taken to reading a lot of history books. Very liberating and reassuring; mainly because their lives were so unfortunate that we don't even have a suitable yardstick to measure how badly they had it any more.

The fear of growing old alone in the twenty-first century diminishes because you know that in the past you weren’t very likely to grow old at all. If you didn’t die of an horrific condition (usually dubbed something like 'Dead Man’s Mandeath') when you were a child or a teenager, then when you did meet someone, you didn’t have to worry if they were going to have an affair, or if your marriage would be happy and lasting - because you’d both be riddled with the same Dead Man’s Mandeath you escaped dying of a couple of years back.

Also, learning from the past makes a decision like which mobile phone, car or even toaster to choose very, very easy...

BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL WITCHCRAFT, DEVILTRY AND SORCERY!

There I am at the showroom, and the salesman asks, “What are you looking for in a car then, sir?”

-Well…I’m looking for one that won’t assume its true form on the M1 when I’m taking the kids to Alton Towers.

-Have you got one that won’t imperil my mortal soul with sweet entreaties and false miracles?

-How many manifestations to a gallon do you get?

-Can I get it in red?

See? Easy! Now it's off to eat boiled pork from a plate in the form of a weevil-infested flat-cake before the King's tax collectors take all I have to pay for his crusade in the Holy Land.