Heed carefully these ancient Albanian words of wisdom

MOST OF our British proverbs are dreadfully sensible and straightforward - all about dropping stitches and looking before you leap - which is why I prefer Albanian proverbs.

Albanian proverbs may all sound as if they are absolutely meaningless, but, on examination, they turn out to have a strange sort of far-off relevance, which reverberates in the mind long after you have forgotten about living in glass houses and not counting your chickens.

Still, rather than just talk about it, I would prefer to bring you another batch of these delicately undercooked epigrams from The Great Book of Albanian Proverbs.

* Man is the only animal that has bothered to work out half-a-dozen quite different ways of swimming, yet we are still the slowest of all swimming animals.

* When a barrister gets his client off, he says that he has won his case, but when he loses a case, he never says that he has lost it, only that justice has unfortunately prevailed.

* Even an underground river has to flow downwards.

* We all like to show off our holiday photographs when we come back home, but we never take photographs of our home life away on holiday with us, to show to our fellow travellers.

* In a court of law, the judge is the most regarded figure, yet, on a football field, the referee is the least well regarded figure.

* Nobody knows whether bird's nest soup is a vegetarian dish or not.

* There is no known instance of an animal sitting down to watch a natural history film.

* If fish were square, the holes in fishing nets would have to be round.

* Nobody feels quite so foolish as a blind man wearing a mask.

* The brown grizzly bear sinks into his surroundings, and the white polar bear is adapted to his surroundings, but the yeti must have the most perfect camouflage of all, since no one has ever seen him.

* A man who stands motionless in the middle of a field for hours, dressed in his roughest clothes, is unlikely to cause birds any alarm. So why do we put so much trust in scarecrows?

* He was the most superstitious footballer I have ever met: he always started by scoring two goals for luck.

* All religions have dietary restrictions attached to them, but vegetarianism brings no god in its train.

* A painter may paint a self-portrait, and writers may write their own memoirs, but an architect can only build himself somewhere to live.

* No matter how much a rock'n'roll star spends on drugs, he always ends up buying a house for his mum.

* Was there really a time when the conjunction of Bishop and Actress was considered the most wicked possible?

* Three things that we have heard about but have never seen are: a guru sitting on top of the Himalayas; a blue moon; and a happy sandboy.

* Three places where we all have to go around carrying labels: airports; hospitals; and swimming-pools.

* Football teams no longer have managers, only coaches. What will happen to bank managers?

* Who is it that jeers most at the strangely coloured hairdos of the young? Blue-rinsed matrons.

* Three things to avoid: a person in Oxford Street carrying a questionnaire on a clipboard; the last chocolate in a chocolate box; and theatre toilets in the interval of a play.

* The best time to go to a doctor is before any symptoms develop.

* Who can have been the first man who ever picked a coffee bean, roasted it, ground it, percolated it, and drank the result, all by accident?

All these quotations are taken from `The Great Book of Albanian Proverbs', 1998 edition