Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Work Time Morning

The key to nature's therapy is feeling like a tiny part of it, not a master over it. There's amazing pride in seeing a bee land on a flower you planted - but that's not your act of creation, it's your act of joining in.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Nature Art Amazing

Weight gain is good because it makes your dresses tight. This is not necessarily classy or flattering, but it means you don't have to iron anything.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Good Your You

After a bath, we all love to dry off with a towel. But do we need it to survive? No. It's a luxury.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Love Wit Towel

When I met my husband, he had never spent more than £10 on a haircut.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Us Than T

I'm convinced we go to school at the wrong time. I'd have been delighted, aged 12, to get out into the world and earn some money doing something menial.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Time Money Men

Makeup is only fun if it's occasional and capricious - just like it's a treat to have an empty day ahead, but it wouldn't be if you were doing 20 years in Parkhurst.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

You Years Year

London Zoo is amazing. I want to take my child there so that she can feel the awe and wonder I felt (and feel) myself.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Amazing Zoo Wonder

The phrase 'working mum' makes me nervous.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Work Working Us

It is impossible to identify a nice scent from within the chemical cloud of a perfume department.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Men Art Within

I have a complicated relationship with the zoo; maybe everyone does. It's so wonderful and so sad.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Sad Relationship Zoo

You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

You Will Weather

It is weird, the relationship between people and food. It's always deeper than you think. It always stands for something else.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Relationship Food You

I don't really think of myself as stupid - but then, who does?

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Who Up Think

I am a big fan of Bournemouth, having enjoyed many happy hours on its sandy beach and crazy golf course.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

T Sandy Sand

I've never seen any 'Star Wars' movie.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

War Wars T

I was a sporadically bossy child.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Radical Hi Child

I have cared so much and so little about the cars I've owned.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Car T Red

The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

You Yin Why

When I was at school, I got into trouble quite often.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Trouble Ten T

It may be vain to care too much how you look, but it is impolite to care too little. You do a generous thing for the world when you present yourself properly.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Car Yourself Yours

When I was at school, I was forced to play lacrosse, a game in which tiny, rock-hard missiles fly at your head, and you must catch them with a stick to avoid a brain haemorrhage. I was regularly punished for not taking part more wholeheartedly.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Being bored by clothes shopping feels smart and intellectual: 'Ooh, get me, insufficiently entertained by racks of skinny jeans; my mind is on higher things.'

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Driving a car is no longer about zooming down clear lanes, the joy and freedom of the road flowing through your hair like a fine westerly breeze. It's about solid traffic, petrol fumes, spy cameras, eco-guilt, and simultaneous social media.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

My 'Only Connect' personality isn't put on: it's definitely me.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Sometimes, the only reason to watch anything acclaimed is on the off-chance you really hate it.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I dreamed of growing up and becoming a zookeeper.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

We all look stupid in patterned tights.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

They say multitasking is a female trait, but it's not about gender; it's about personality type.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Never take your makeup off before bed. Sleep in it. That way, you're all ready to go if a hot postman rings the doorbell early.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I tried doing yoga to see if it would make me a more patient person, but I lost interest after about six minutes.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

When I was at school, I loved maths and read lots of books and was horrified at the idea of having a boyfriend... I was probably a nerd, but then, it was a negative term.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Video piracy is among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who work in the film business. Adverts telling you not to commit video piracy are among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who don't.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I pay higher premiums because my speeding points spell 'recklessness' to the insurance company, but you can't imagine how risk-averse I am at the wheel. I only go over 30 at all because it's dangerous to drive too much slower than everyone else.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Nature made your eyebrows like that for a reason. I don't know the reason. Some people say it's to do with keeping rain out of monkeys' eyes. Whatever. The point is, if you try to redesign your eyebrows with tweezers and pens, it will look terrible.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Casino games such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat, slot machines and so on, are stacked in favour of the house.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed 'fear that women aren't funny' being one of them.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Given the choice, I'm sure the majority of children would rather have a packed lunch than school meals.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Half the point of education is to build peer groups and social bonds.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

I had an instinct to take my husband's name when I got married. It felt like a romantic statement of pride, love, and permanence and of doing what's always been done in my family.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

The idea of MPs texting and emailing through debates makes my gorge rise, as it does when a minicab driver makes phone calls at the wheel. I'm not paying you to keep in touch with your mates!

Victoria Coren Mitchell