At the very moment he cried out, David realised that what he had run into was only the Christmas tree. Disgusted with himself at such cowardice, he spat a needle from his mouth, stepped back from the tree and listened. There were no sounds of any movement upstairs: no shouts, no sleepy grumbles, only a gentle tinkle from the decorations as the tree had recovered from the collision.

At this moment the rabbit sprang from his arms and disappeared among the brush wood. Go to pot, said the man, you are a good-for-nothing dry-meated beast, to make the best of you.

And I get a huge kick out of laughing at the hilariously unpredictable inflexibility of the computer models of mental processes that my doctoral students and I codesign.

As stated in treating of the action of the cavities of the heart, they become distended by their own resiliency after their systole; the vacual tendency thus formed will cause a flow of blood towards the right auricle, and contribute to the venous circulation.