I'm in an old house where the people before us had a second plasterboard ceiling fixed to slats over the old one. It's like a double glazing ceiling. Would there be space for you to do that I wonder?

I stand corrected - but wonder if the politicians who've created the mess are the people to fix it. Surprised there is no confidence that what has never let us down in crises can heal itself.

On the long list of things needing attention, starting with the lamentable BBC, the military comes nowhere.

Is there anyone who doesn't have loft insulation by now?
This grant is going to push up the costs of all 'green' measures. Who benefits from that?

Back in 1990 we rented a room to a couple of Iraqi post grad students who'd had to leave the international hostel because the invasion of Kuwait created a lot of hostility. When they left, the colossal mess in their room included some fancy single malt scotch bottles. (They were doing degrees in combustion and powder technology. Not powder paint as far as I know. Money talks in universities.)

Interesting you should say this because there's an article by William Ridgeway in this month's Standpoint on the Arab taste for booze and wild nights - men only of course scooting out of the way of the religious police for the weekend. I'm old enough to remember when the tabloids had regular pics of oil sheiks coming out of nightclubs with a hooker on each arm. The good old days before all this puritanical claptrap took hold.

There is a Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain which comforts and shelters apostates, but keeps its members and meetings quiet - and that's why your suggestion won't work I'm afraid without constant armed protection.

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews as people. Criticism of Judaism's beliefs and history is not. For example, Lot and his daughters, Abraham's attempted murder of Isaac, or the claim that the mishmash of overlapping injunction's that Moses brought down the mountain came from the mind of God.
The MCB and others want to protect Islam from discussion which cannot be other than critical given its reprehensible and absurd scriptural features - do we really need to list them? Unlike Judaism it has a history - with a brief interlude - of violence and supremacist, imperialist ideology and flat lies. One example: Jews (and now Christians) have been ethnic cleansed and murdered in Muslim lands for centuries, yet we constantly hear that Palestinians have a right of return, not that Jews have to Egypt, Iraq, Syria and so on.
Abusing Muslims is a crime covered by existing law. Attacking the ideology, or any other ideology, is a duty.
Jonson was making a harmless joke embodying a truth - that face coverings are shameful.
One would like to ask such women whether they realise that girls in Iran and Saud and other Islamic states who want to wear what they like are raped, whipped and imprisoned, and whether their scarves are not showing solidarity with such depraved, cowardly, misogynist and perverted men who rule ALL Muslim countries.
I suppose that would be Islamophobic.

Optimist. My tenner is on her still being there when the mouth of hell opens and swallows the lot of us.
Nothing has changed, she'll be saying, nothing has changed.

Ooooo. It's a dog's life being a bitch.