It is high time I wrote something profound. To do so has always been within my gift, of course, it is just that I have neglected it. Oh, every single day I am beset by thoughts of great profundity, though admittedly these may oft be mistaken for platitudes, truisms, or mad ravings.

This morning, for example, as I awoke with the sunrise, at approximately half past four, the first thing that came into my head was the phrase “All roads lead to Rome”. How profound that is. We could, if we wished, worry away at it for hours and hours, like a cat with a strand of wool, and, unlike the cat, we would forever find new insights, new angles, unfathomable depths of wisdom and, yes, profundity. The cat, by contrast, being ineradicably stupid, would forget whatever it had learned about the strand of wool thirty seconds ago. I am sometimes envious of cats. Imagine how exciting life must be, to be so stupid!

Unfortunately, with my pea-sized yet pulsating brain, I am able to fret and fiddick about the five words “All roads lead to Rome” for hour after hour. I can draw from them profound insights about history and geography and the nature of what it means to be human, and much else besides. I can become lost in profundity.

By the way, I made up that word “fiddick”. Or at least, I commandeered the surname of the last editor of the much-lamented The Listener, Peter Fiddick, to serve as a verb meaning something along the lines of fretting at and worrying at something, as a cat might fret and worry at a strand of wool, as a fool might fret at an old adage. But you knew what I meant, didn’t you?