I thought we'd spent thirty years leaving that Ye Olde... behind, crashed in the ditch along with Mrs Dales Dairy. The only Ye Olde round here is the Cherry Tree, and it has earned the title the hard way, having withstood many generations of regular pissartists and chain pub remodelling. The nearest they've got to it is converting the lawyers next door to a Travelodge.

Perhaps the answer is for the Border sides to temporarily replace the Fool with a charicature of the polly of their choice. That should deliver the message...

When Cameron was appointed, I was more than somewhat disappointed David Davies got sidelined so early. It's the leader who sets the tone, and people like Gideon aren't breaking through.

The sense of morris being pratting about is a form of social conformity typified by the insistence that you should stay in on Saturday night watching Strictly-cum-Dancing and the National Illitteracy. I'm even starting to hurt that Doctor Who's getting aligned with that characterless ticky-tacky-housing bread-and-circuses do-nothingness. It's a lie, of course: most morris sides are rather useful these days, being very competent dancers well able to show they have nothing to apologise for and demonstrating a vernacular skill of a thoroughly professional standard. In plain English, they're worth watching. In addition, they are carrying their heritage with them, not drawing from it, but taking full and competent charge of it.

And to finish this chain of disconnected thoughts, I thank you for the courtesy of the errant stray into academia as a formal proof of why the "all blackface is racist" are wrong. They didn't get the point that having a dirty face for whatever reason - gardening, military, you name it - does not make you racist, so the only other way was to hit them with some maths, reducing it to symbols. It does no harm that the work done building this tool was completed by Lewis Carroll, of Through The Looking Glass fame - the work being an applied theme-and-variations of the thinking. And that is where the logic used by the critics belongs - in a never-never land where words mean whatever the critics like. JUnlike the real world.