I love making savory stratas for Christmas morning. I get excited about it. It's a polenta strata with homemade bread, with a billion eggs and Parmesan cheese. I'll drizzle truffle oil over the whole thing, which will just destroy people. It's amazing.

All my grandchildren bake. On a Saturday, Annabel's boys, Louis and Toby, always bake. Louis makes a chocolate cake, Toby makes banana or lemon drizzle. They're 12 and 10, and they can do it totally on their own. My son's twin girls, Abby and Grace, are 14; they make birthday cakes and like to do it on their own with Mum out of the way.

If people were rain, I'd be a drizzle and she'd be a hurricane.

"Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive

What most people describe as a 'brainstorm' is nothing more than a passing drizzle.

I would encourage you not to confuse a passing drizzle with a brainstorm. Because if you do, it won't take a meteorologist to tell you what's coming, and it'll take more than an umbrella to protect you from it.

"No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place, to call he people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everybody had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I didn't want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner.

The rain fluctuates between drizzle and torrential. It messes with your mind. It makes you think things will always be like this, never getting better, always letting you down right when you though the worst was over.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.