Apologies for the lack of posts. I thought this was going to be a couple of very quiet weeks, but the work has been pouring in. The old RSI has shown signs of flaring up and I've been trying to keep typing to a minimum. I have been using my pen tablet and handwriting recognition software, but the results can bee a bite erotic.

I'm at Mum and Dad's place right now. l had a leisurely ride down here via Lincoln, one of the most beautiful (and overlooked) cities in the country.

ln the city centre, as you might expect, the market research people and their clipboards were out in force. l used the opportunity to try my new rapid-reaction tactic for the times when one of the bastards accosts you before you have time to whip your phone out and pretend to be making an impassioned last call to your small, dying daughter. It's this: when they hit you with their first line, simply respond in a foreign language. In case they know a little French, German, Italian or whatever, make sure you use the expression for 'I'm sorry, I don't speak English'.

It's a great tactic for several reasons. First, they tend to be embarrassed, especially if you follow up your initial response with a series of questions that they plainly don't understand; second, whereas if you give a negative response in English they will often come back at you a second time, a foreign language response effectively ends the conversation; third - and this is the real beauty of this trick - even if they understand the language you've used, they'll still leave you alone. Their job is to get British people to fill in their wretched questionaires. Foreigners are useless to them.

As for the hero, hats off all round to Richard Dawkins for his effort on Channel Four tonight, The Root Of All Evil?. It was the usual Dawkins let's-get-proper-stuck-into-medieval-superstition science vs. religion gorefest, consisting of mad mullahs and fundamentalist Bible twitchers being allowed to make fools of themselves all over TV. Clearly most of the people Dawkins is addressing are either confirmed secularists or moderate Christians, Muslims and Jews, so this wasn't really an 'exploration' or an 'analysis' - it was a good honest freakshow. Dawkins' zealots weren't the Bishop of Bath and Wells or Lionel Blue; they were proper, fire and brimstone old-time religionists. Dawkins doesn't have much time for them, and the feeling's mutual.

It's not just the apocalypic nutters that don't like Dawkins though - they have the odd whining apologist on the liberal side of the fence. Madeleine Bunting, a journalist I'd rather respected until now, was moaning about him in Saturday's Guardian. But what really annoyed me about Bunting's piece didn't really concern religion at all:

It's also right for religion to concede ground to science to explain natural processes; but at the same time, science has to concede that despite its huge advances it still cannot answer questions about the nature of the universe - such as whether we are freak chances of evolution in an indifferent cosmos. [My italics]

This is such a typical, clichéd example of a media person failing to understand the basic philosophy of science that it's embarrassing.