The other day I was walking home when I saw a dog on the other side of the road, waiting at one end of the pedestrian crossing. A car came up and, on seeing the dog, stopped. The dog then crossed the road. It was nice.

When I got home I started doing some reading, and I was reading this paper about damage and repair in cacti. It was fairly rubbish, to be honest, and was written in funny foreigner’s English. The best feature of the authors’ English (for there were more than one) was his reference to the local people (who used the cacti as food for their sheep) as ‘peasants’. It was hilarious! I found a sentence like “The peasants often cut open the cladodes and allow the sheep to eat the parenchyma.” That, too, was nice.