What politician ever thinks beyond 4 or 5 years? But such thinking is hopelessly inadequate for the big questions that involve the fabric of the world we live in.

I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching. Birdwatching is a state of being, not an activity. It doesn’t depend on place, on equipment, on specific purpose, like, say, fishing. It is not a matter of organic trainspotting; it is about life and it is about living.

Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.

Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven’t had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.

Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it.

Sport is something that does not matter, but is performed as if it did. In that contradiction lies its beauty.

We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world.

It is a truism that no row is ever about what it is about.

Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another – desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.

A living countryside is not a luxury but a necessity for the human population; if you let conservation go hang until your pockets are jingling there will be a lot less to conserve.