Rubbish bags - say that with feeling as the flimsy own brand ones I bought yet again split like leftist factions and spew rubbish all over the floor.

Very obvious - but whisky. All cheap whiskies are disgusting.

I feel slightly abashed that Mary Beard read my comments about her looks even though they weren't derogatory. I had the sense that we were talking about her when she was out of earshot. It's very rude to talk about someone's looks within their hearing.

Anyway, I do like the long-haired and much parodied Neil Oliver, but if he had been talking about cars instead of Scottish history I would not have bothered with him. That very nice Brian Cox is appealing because he conveys awe and wonder. On the other hand, David Attenborough is ancient and is the most loved documentary presenter in Britain, though these days when he stands about in the snow I feel concerned - he should be at home in a comfy chair with a mug of Ovaltine.

I'd allow a small percentage - say about 3% - of the importance of the presenter's appearance to enjoyment of documentaries. Would anyone watch their objects of desire female presenters if they were talking about something uninteresting?

I like Beard's series as I like anything about the Romans and she's got some fascinating information - eg how people's occupations were recorded on their tombstones instead of their father's name. I find her translations a bit too tabloid. She really drum rolls the raunchiness. She's over-vulgarising, which is as annoying as over-refining. It's all sex and toilets.

I did wonder how she managed to find quiet Roman streets to cycle along - some of them looked in the middle of the city, with hardly a car to be seen. I was envying her her cycle along the Appian Way, among those tombs and cypresses, but it's so cobbled it would be pretty difficult to be able to spot a specific tomb - if you cycle on cobbles you spend your time hanging on.

As for her looks, she's fine for her age - no uglier than Kenneth Clarke of Civilisation, the prototype of this kind of clever person talking to you while they show you stuff. Gill would have struck a more original line if he'd said he liked her healthy looking skin and pleasant expression - in fact, if he'd said he had the hots for her.

That article by Nabila Ramdani contained this statement:-

"But Merah has apparently confessed to killing Muslims too: they were among the ethnic minority troops gunned down last week, with Merah claiming that he objected to their regiment fighting in Afghanistan. The truth is that extremist killers seldom differentiate between religions. Suggesting otherwise would mean turning Merah into a crude stereotype."

As quite a few people in the comments thread point out, extremist killers do differentiate between religions - between Shi-ite and Sunni for instance. In the case of the Mumbai massacre, Jews were targeted, as they were in Toulouse. Muslims in "Christian" or "Crusader" armed forces are often targeted as well.

And a crude stereotype of what? An Islamist presumably - the kind of person that does differentiate between religions by seeking out Jews and what were presumably to him were quisling Muslims.

She's getting a good trouncing in the comments thread, as is the Guardian.

It's a dreadful article - evidently all that the Guardian could scrape up that wasn't going to "crudely" talk about political Islam and would point out the evil of "stereotyping" followers of that cause for doing exactly what they are expected to do. .

Actually I think Hitchens's bad experiences with religion were not in childhood but with American Christian fundamentalist whackos and murderous mullahs from the Rushdie affair on. So I think those could be called "formative bad experiences" like, say, a Communist turning against Communism after the Moscow show trials or the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Botton's "theory" seems to be the vulgarest Freudianism, that an intellectual position must have been gained as a kind of trauma in childhood, rather than a rational response to the various evils in the world that religion propagates.

well the whole of feminism and gay rights movements is built on being 'offended' and 'psychologically distressed' by nasty sexist, misogyny and homophobia.

Of course. From the suffragettes being force fed in prison to those campaigning for domestic violence and rape being taken seriously by the police, it was all a matter of ultra-sensitive souls getting their little feelings ruffled about nothing.

Isn't a theocracy a Nanny state run by the old-fashioned kind of Nanny who whipped you and told you that you were a limb of Satan who would go to hell?

There's another bit published in the Independent about the thrill of being a young hacker, which is quite interesting. By day a slacker, by night a hacker who has penetrated NASA - a kind of mild mannered Clark Kent turning into Superman. He's absorbed in that as guys of a similar age would be absorbed in making music. However his superior abilities as a hacker gives JA the delusion that he has an all round superior philosophical intellect - which ain't true.. O'Hagan, it seems, got fed up with the cod philosophy JA wanted to include in his autobiography.

Oh come on! Sunny has a map on the wall, some flags and a pointer all ready. You're not going to spoil it for him, are you?