FUN WITH LETTERS

POPULAR AMERICAN COMEDIAN BORIS JOHNSON is once again in the news, and although I had more or less decided to abandon writing on this blog there are events which have a mysterious ability to attract me to the keyboard as long as I have time.

THE LAST TIME SUCH an event took place was when equally popular American television entertainer Donald Trump cleared dandruff from bemused French president Macron's shoulder, but this time it is the kerfuffle surrounding what Boris Johnson wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Even this morning, the 19th of August, people are still arguing in television debates over whether Johnson should be punished for something he wrote two weeks ago.

JOHNSON IS FAR TOO FLY to "state" rather than infer his views, and an intelligent readership should judge on what is in fact written, something which none of the commentators I have read or heard have done; as if, in fact, they have not read the column.

JOHNSON criticises Denmark for joining France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Chechnya, Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, Congo and Niger in banning burkas and niqabs. He quite correctly states that, in his opinion, women should not be told what to wear.

HERE IS WHERE I THINK many of the flea-brained leftie politicians have misunderstood the intelligence of Johnson's writing: I would perhaps be prepared to suggest that a good many young women -- one of them was interviewed yesterday on the BBC -- do not wish to wear the burka, but are forced to do so by their fathers and are often punished cruelly for not obeying the male members of the family. That is, of course, that many women who wear the burka have been told what to wear and what not to wear -- due to the obscure and unfounded religious beliefs of the men in their families.

Mr Johnson´s "joke" about letter boxes is obviously tongue-in-cheek. And he does not say that Muslim women look like letter boxes, merely that it is ridiculous for someone to "choose to look like a letter box" and that if a female student turned up for a lecture looking like a bank robber this would cause alarm. As a lecturer I must agree with him.

(My photographs show a letter box -- not a post box -- a bank robber and Boris Johnson with Donald Trump, in order to aid clarity on the issue.)