Last May I was taken with a book of wry, humorous reflections by Mahmud Khan, a mathematics graduate from Leeds University in the 1970s, who lives with his family in Bradford.

As a man interested in science and logic, Mr Khan is much taken with the daily oddities and absurdities of human behaviour, including those of a barber.

This man sported a curly Salvador Dali moustache. But when it became the object of jokes he shaved off half of it, to see if this would reduce the sarcasm.

It didn’t. When things got worse, he declared: “….shaving it all off would make things unbearable. Thank God for my sanity.” This may be a true story, it may be a fable; the point is it illustrates Mr Khan’s clear-eyed view of the rationalisations we make to explain or justify ourselves. His book is well worth reading – and now there are more pages and hand-drawn illustrations.