It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little… — Hugh Laurie

I was definitely getting the hang of this skating thing. I'd started to copy a fancy cross-over turn from a German girl in front of me, and it was working pretty well. I was just about keeping up with her too, which was pleasing. She must have been about six.

O'Neal had uttered three words: 'Conspiracy to murder.'

The correct word for me to repeat in an incredulous tone of voice would have been 'murder'; a very small, and psychiatrically disturbed, section of the population might have opted for the 'to'; but the one word out of the three I most definitely should not have chosen to repeat was 'conspiracy'.

This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.