Its all very interesting, and raises a worthwhile debating issue - well several issues really.

As a pre-amble I must say that I don't buy the one about us being the most secular nation in the world.

The men who founded the welfare state and the NHS had internalised the Sermon on the Mount much more deeply than some tripehound earnestly seeking to save his soul with a lot of prayers, and chanting and mumbo jumbo.

As artists do we have to censor ourselves?

The work we do does not exist in a vacuum and and it gains at least some of its validity from the audience. In his book My Guru by Christopher Isherweood - he describes taking his Guru to a performance of George Bernard Shaw - a play where GBS was poking fun at the church, in his imitable way. Isherwood asked his Guru, would you have laughed if those jokes had been about yourself and Krishna?

If the Rushdie case did not make it clear enough. It is apparent that some religious people simply do not have that spanner in their toolkit. No sense of humour, irony, literary understanding that separates the words said by the character in the book from the thoughts of the artist writing the book.

A while back I wrote a song called The Day Delaney's Donkey had sex with the Pope. I thought I'd done a decent job writing it. the only time I performed it though - a friend in the audience begged me never to sing it again. It had obviously caused deep offence, and I trusted his instincts. Some people came up afterwards ans said that they never missed a mass in their lives, but they loved it but I never have performed again, and doubt I ever shall. and when a mainstream radio station in Ireland started playing it - I asked them to stop.

I do admire people like Woody Guthrie who would sing a song fearlessly to a gang of segregationists.

I think maybe the difference is that Woody knew he was taunting complete assholes. Rushdie, this Sikh lady and myself - I suspect we were affronting some rather nice people........