From the Longest Crawl

"Life......broken down into its constituent years, days, hours, minutes, plotted on a graph, the rhythms resemble one another from moment to moment, and year to year; we have good days and bad days, minor ups and downs as a rule, puncutated by wild, inexplicable turns of fortune; peaks and troughs where your life crashes, or springs into a period of uncontrollable growth and change. And if you're British, to help you climb the slopes, and help smooth the slide into the valleys, there's booze."

From Ian Marchant (who, I would predict, would come across as a bit of a prat in real life, but who, in the printed word, is pretty entertaining).