After a reference to Australia's "homework" scandal in the bad old days of Mickey Arthur's stewardship, Watson was happy to sustain the back-to-school analogy.
And, of course, there are many happy and sustained relationships, married or not, heterosexual or not, walked into clear-eyed or maintained in the teeth of destroyed memories.
This is a turnaround from 15 years ago, when a majority wanted the government to back down.For years the French elected politicians who were happy to sustain the illusion that generous benefits and snug protections were indefinitely affordable by building up the debts they leave to future generations.
Many more demobbed soldiers, prisoners, political malcontents and women (to keep the men happy and sustain the population) were sent to join the settlers.In 1975, a year before he died, Mao Zedong abolished the corps, which was in tatters due to factional feuding in the Cultural Revolution and the ravages of central planning.
What if, alive to the pitfalls and uncertainties that lie ahead, they are happy to sustain a measure of deficit in their own finances for several years to come, trusting that, in return, an investment is made in the economic future of the country by delivering policies that will lift their neighbours out of poverty?
I remain baffled that Tony Blair, with his relentless moral fervour, seems happy to sustain relationships with such people as Mandelson and Alastair Campbell who, pace Hutton, live and breathe in a moral vacuum, in which the only recognised imperative is political convenience.
In her debut novel, Stiltsville, Susanna Daniel uses lyrical story-telling to relate profound truths about the attachments we form in life -- to people, to places, and to notions of who we are -- and how those attachments, formed in happy times, sustain us though the hard times.
While that is a pretty good plan for creating a Happy Valentine's Day or Happy Anniversary, it is a woefully inadequate plan for sustaining a happy marriage.
It isn't great sex that sustains happy relationships, it's happy relationships that lead to more fulfilling sex.
One of my happiness-project resolutions is to "be a storehouse of happy memories," because remembering happy times in the past is an important way to boost happiness in the present, and children need parents' help to sustain happy memories.
