Cute foster kids you've got there...

...be a shame if anything happened to them.

Not, I grant, the exact words used by Cameroonian posh boy Matthew d'Ancona to warn us off overmuch involvement with Ukip. But the bottom line is unmistakeable.

Voters of Rotherham, may I respectfully suggest that a lost deposit would send a salutary message to Mr d'Ancona and his ilk?

A papal knighthood

'The papal knighthood given to Jimmy Savile "should not have been bestowed", a Vatican spokesman has told the BBC.'

No. it should not, though no blame attaches to its award unless the Vatican was better informed than his colleagues and bosses at the BBC will admit to being.

'The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales confirmed it has written to the Holy See to ask if the honour can be posthumously removed.'

No, it cannot. He held it while he lived, and death removed it from him. There's no more to be said. Unless we want to go the whole hog by exhuming his corpse so that we can put it on trial. Let the secular world wallow in post-Christian superstition; Archbishop Nichols ought to know better. One appreciates that for painfully obvious reasons he feels the need to be seen to be doing something, but this is simply the wrong thing.

The penalties now faced by Jimmy Savile are not a matter for the Church or any other human agency. A papal knighthood is just part of the worldly pomp which we will all be stripped of when we go to meet our Maker. It's not for us to judge how repentant he was, or far his many good works were done for good motives. Those of us who are conscious of having done a lot less good and no little harm in the course of our lives would do well to pray for his soul.

Set my people free

Much rejoicing at the Curmudgeon's Arms last night, following the annoucement that live live music licences are to be thrown onto the bonfire of red tape. A veritable cultural renaissance is in prospect. We've already booked up-and-coming local tribute band Puppy Riot.

The neighbours? Oh, no doubt they will get used to it in time.

One or two of our regulars got so carried away that they were on the verge of lighting a celebratory fag. Luckily, however, they were reminded just in time that the law requires good citizenship and consideration for others.

Mars, the bringer of flab

I'm sure I'm one of many who have been beguiled by the BBC headline "People can be fat yet fit, research suggests". In fact the piece would be more accurately titled "Being fat is only bad for you when it makes you ill". So it seems those deep-fried Mars bars should remain off-limits.

Though I haven't eaten a Mars bar in years, there was a time when I considered a coffee and a Mars an entirely satisfactory substitute for breakfast.

Not, however, deep-fried. Does anyone really eat them that way, or is that just a viciously Scotophobic urban myth? This settles the question in a somewhat curious manner. "Dispel" as a synonym for "prove to be entirely true" is a new one on me.

Getting it into proportion

This, you might think, is ipso facto a hate crime. Not so in the eyes of the law. And since it is not, it is perfectly reasonable that it should be only one-sixth as awful as this.

Not alone

Has any expression been coined for the opposite of "going viral"? I mean, where something is studiously ignored as a prelude to a determined forgetting that there was ever anything to ignore.

Whatever it is called, that is what happened to the trial of the Derby Three. Comment is Free? No comment. Daily Telegraph blogs? Nothing. Harry's Place. scourge of homophobes? Nada. And so on. It got so little prominence on the news pages that possibly some of the commentariat never knew about it - but dammit, if I could manage to spot it...

A few pages into a Google search I came across an interesting comment posted on a Muslim news site (can't find it now, unfortunately), criticizing the Three on two not entirely compatible grounds. The first was that the they had taken too little account of the mercy of God - for which sentiment may the writer be richly blessed. The second, not quite so reassuring, was, in effect, that it was impolitic for British Muslims to frighten the horses.

And that was all. Now, however, I've come across this piece by "an insomniac Scots Calvinist", who earns a place of honour on a sort-of-Scots Piskie-turned-Catholic's blogroll. This is the gist of it:-

If someone hands you an offensive leaflet calling for the death penalty for homosexuals and you find it repellent do what grown ups do with election material from the Lib Dems, put it in the bin.

Precisely - problem solved with significantly less trouble than if a wannabe punk band is chanting obscenities in front of the altar in the church where you are trying to pray (and our friend has some thoughts on that affair in his latest post).

And there's lots more well worth a read. So there are two of us united in the belief that speech in the UK ought to be freer than in Putin's Russia (where, by the way, the much maligned Orthodox Church has actually done the Christian thing and called for clemency for Pussy Riot - Ben Summerskill please note). Who will join us?

The BBC's way with words

At least 48 people have been killed in ethnic clashes in south-eastern Kenya, police say.

The clashes in Tana River district, Coast Province, took place late on Tuesday between the Orma and Pokomo groups, the region's police chief said.

Most of the dead were women and children, many of whom were hacked to death with machetes, he said.

The clash is the worst single incident since violence rocked the country after disputed polls four years ago.

Regional deputy police chief Joseph Kitur told AFP news agency that those killed were either hacked to death or burned alive when their huts were set alight.

If only those women and children would stop clashing. They're as bad as Egyptian Christians.

Is "massacre" reserved for the actions of colonialists?