63. An Englishman's home is his castle

Number of UK homes repossessed in 2007: 10,000
Number of UK homes repossessed in 2008: 48,000
Predicted number to be repossessed in 2009: 75,000
Total number of empty homes across the UK, at 1 January 2009: 762,000

62. It's all in the timing

It’s not what you do, or even the way you do it, that matters... so much as when you do it. Everything is slave to the clock and the calendar, everything victims and beneficiaries of Old Father Time. A brilliant plan today would have failed yesterday; a disaster last week would have been a triumph next week. The Titanic did not sink because it hit an iceberg – it sank because it hit an iceberg at precisely the moment it did. An extraordinary sequence of events all had to come together in exactly the right order and in exactly the right times in order for that ship to hit that iceberg in that place and at that second in such a way that it would sink. A fraction out anywhere down the line and she would have steamed into New York a triumph of man’s dominion over nature. The statistical probability of precisely what happened actually happening was infinitesimal. And yet, sink she did.
The same principle applies to literally everything that has ever happened. Careful planning and attention to detail matter... but timing is everything. Some things you can predict; others are subject to nothing but the rising and setting of the sun and moon. It’s the one fundamental constant of all existence.

61. Be prepared

The “Scouts’ motto”, as espoused by Robert Baden-Powell in his 1908 book Scouting for Boys. According to the author, this means being “always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your DUTY”. It means “having disciplined yourself to be obedient to every order,” and “making yourself strong and active and able to do the right thing at the right moment”. It means being “prepared to work, and to work hard, and to turn your hand to any kind of job”. It means “every good Briton must be prepared to keep up our Empire,” and most of all, it means “be prepared to die for your country if need be, so that when the moment arrives you may charge home with confidence, not caring whether you are going to be killed or not.”
Not caring whether you are going to be killed or not. A fine doctrine for a generation.

60. Stop. Look. Listen

From The Observer, 23 March 2008:
UN says road deaths kill as many as Aids
The United Nations is to hold its first debate on road safety amid warnings that the problem is a ‘public health crisis’ on the scale of Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.
Next week’s meeting will follow research by the World Health Organisation which forecast that between 2000 and 2015 road accidents would cause 20 million deaths, 200 million serious injuries and leave more than one billion people killed, injured, bereaved or left to care for a victim.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says every year 1.2 million people die in road accidents – making it, according to WHO’s 2002 calculations, the seventh biggest killer in the world, ahead of diabetes and malaria. The WHO predicted that by 2020 road deaths would become the number three killer, behind heart disease and suicide.
Yet international funding for Aids, malaria and TB was $4.7bn over the last seven years, compared with about $100m for road safety, the commission said.
Road crashes are already the number one killer of young people aged 10-24.

59. Everyone turns into their parents

I am beginning to recognise my father: I’m beginning to see him in me. Increasingly, I find myself using his phrases, inheriting his foibles. A stickling for certain grammatical niceties and an exasperation with nonsensical verbal modernisms. For example: he couldn’t abide people saying “invite” when they meant “invitation” – and now neither can I. Likewise, I find myself unconsciously wincing when, after I’ve asked someone how they are, they reply “I’m good”. You’re not good, I think. Or if you are, that’s not what I asked. What you mean is, you’re well. And even as I’m mentally correcting them I can hear my Dad saying the same thing.

58. Be positive

“I’d like to say people can change anything they want to; and that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks. I am one of them. But we’ve all gotta stop... just stop following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything; this is something that I’m beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other; it’s because they’ve been dehumanized. It’s time to take that humanity back into the centre of the ring and follow that for a time.
Greed... it ain’t going anywhere! They should have that on a big billboard across Times Square. Think on that. Without people you’re nothing.”
Joe Strummer

57. Look how you like and like how you look

Boothby Clopton was a celebrated dandy of the 18th Century, famous for his flamboyant dress and for squandering a massive family fortune. (In true gentlemanly style, gambling debts were always paid before money owed to tradesmen. His tailor, however, never went hungry.) Caricatured as “Prince” Boothby by contemporary wits, he eventually shot himself – not from disgrace at his vices or shame over his debts... but because getting dressed and undressed each day had become such a bore. His suicide note read simply: “I tire of all this buttoning and unbuttoning.”

56. Inform; educate; entertain

The three words that describe the philosophy and motives behind all human achievement. Aim only for these and you won’t go far wrong.

55. If you tolerate this then your children will be next

The slogan on a Spanish Republican poster, circa 1937, now hanging in the Imperial War Museum in London. The Spanish Civil War was the precursor to the Second World War: the fascist rebels, led by General Franco, were aided by Nazi Germany, who used the conflict as an opportunity to roadtest devastating new weapons and strategies. The poster shows a sky filled with the deadly crosses of fascist aeroplanes, under which was a photograph of a little girl killed by blitz bombing. The message was stark and brutal and simple: dead children in Spain today, dead children across the world tomorrow.
Thousands joined the International Brigade in response, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway... but the world at large remained unmoved. And within five years all mainland Europe felt the terror of the fascist war machine.

54. All young people are beautiful

The clear skin and clean limbs and rude health, the easy confidence and bright eyes and eager minds... is there anything more beautiful than the young? And even those without the good health and rosy glow, even those with body hang-ups and mental blocks and self-esteem issues: underneath it all, the light still burns. Whether they realise or not, they still have that swagger, that unfakeable, glorious insouciance of those with every possibility imaginable laid out ahead of them.
We’re accused of deifying the young, of pandering to their beauty. Quite right too. Theirs is all beauty: and wisdom comes later.

53. I think, therefore I am

Blind acceptance, dumb adherence, meek following of the party line diminishes you as a human. It makes you less than human. When you don’t think for yourself, you stop being. When you don’t question, you lose humanity. Stop believing in everything you’re told. Start thinking. Become.

52. Nice guys come last

Winning is a fundamentally cruel business, and becoming a winner means shedding some of your best human qualities in pursuit of the prize. That’s the payoff, the price of first place. Nobody ever did it without some ruthlessness, or greed, or selfishness, or venality. Nobody ever came first at anything without cultivating a darker side. And ambition, as someone said, makes us look pretty ugly.
But it’s not an absolute price. Balance is everything. You can be a winner and still retain essentially decent core values, enough to outweigh whatever dark side of your personality you cultivated to get there in the first place. You can be enough of a nice guy for people to overlook your faults.
The reverse does not apply. The wholly nice will not succeed. The wholly nice exist mostly to be clambered over by the mostly nice, the fairly nice, the nice-ish, the not-so-nice, the plain horrid. Be nice: but perhaps not too nice.

51. The future is unwritten

There’s no such thing as fate, or destiny. There is no predetermination, no astrology and anyone who says different is trying to sell you something. Nobody can see the future, nobody can predict what might happen tomorrow. So grow up, take responsibility. Stop hiding behind an illusion of powerlessness in the face of a decided future; stop telling yourself you’re just a passenger, just a victim, only ever able to react to events that were always going to happen anyway. And for crying out loud, stop reading your horoscope, stop examining your tea leaves, stop looking for answers in cards and crystal balls. The future is unwritten. By the weekend we could be lottery winners and we could be dead. We could be both.

50. History doesn't repeat itself, it moves in parallels

To be clear: nothing repeats itself. Height, width and breadth can be replicated exactly – time cannot. And that fourth dimension affects everything that happens everywhere, every time. Nothing is the same second time around, or third, fourth, fiftieth, six hundredth, seven thousandth. Circumstances and the tick of the clock exert their own inescapable influence.
And so Hitler’s ill-fated, mistake-ridden invasion of Russia mimicked that of Napoleon... but it was not a repetition. And so the Global Slump of 2009 is not the same as the Great Depression of 1929 – which in turn was not the same as the South Sea bubble of 1720, when everyone went mad for investing in fundamentally unsound schemes and the resulting panic brought down the British economy.
And so your habit of falling for the wrong kind of lover, or for quitting jobs, or for slipping back into your addictions, does not mean history keeps repeating itself – it simply means your present mistakes are a mimicking of your past mistakes. A parallel.
And the influence of time on this? Time does what time does – time provides hindsight, time provides a kind of mocking knowledge of our own powerlessness in the face of our own stupidity, our own weaknesses.

49. Nothing is certain except death and taxes

And the fear of both can keep you awake at night, chewing fingernails, staring at nothing, replaying the same fatalistic scenarios in your head in the vain hope that just once the outcome will be different. It won’t. Get an accountant; get a priest. You can’t beat this. All you can do is try to minimise the damage.

48. An apple a day keeps the doctor away

Research conducted over the last decade has found that drinking up to three glasses of red wine a day reduces the risk of heart disease by anything up to 40 per cent.
A study in April 2008 by the Journal for Neuroinflammation found that consuming caffeine reduces the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict upon the body. Other research has found that three cups of coffee a day can reduce the risk of liver disease by 40 per cent.
In July 2008 it was reported that nicotine was being investigated as a basis for a drug to combat Alzheimer’s.
But on the other hand, in July 2004 it was reported that “children who eat an apple or pear a day may be exceeding the pesticide safety threshold because of residues on the fruit”. A study published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health found that up to 220 children a day could be exposing themselves to "immediate and long term threats to health”. From eating apples.
There’s a moral to this story.