The horrors of a holy war

THANKS for your suggestions for a new national anthem based on Do You Hear the People Sing? From Les Miserables. While I accept England is currently wet, flooded, sodden and miserable I expected something better than Do You Hear the People Wring?

I TRUST the foul weather has not interrupted your diligent save-the-planet routine of making sure the plastic bottles and glass bottles do not go in the same container. Has anyone noticed how much better the weather was before wheeliebins?

SO it's statins all-round. The wonder-drug of the cholesterol age is to be prescribed to millions of Brits, even those at relatively low risk of heart attacks. The aim, presumably, is to make us live for ever, or at least long enough to die from cancer or dementia. Progress, eh?

I LOST count of how many times Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins used his bank's latest buzz-word on his Radio 4 interview. Barclays probably paid the earth for some City PR company to dream up this most vacuous of slogans and the intensely irritating Mr Jenkins was clearly getting his money's worth. Time after time he stressed that Barclays was becoming "the go-to bank." It is at moments like this that you wish radio were a two-way process and you could say to Mr Jenkins: "The very next time you insult my intelligence with 'the go-to bank,' I will reach through the loudspeaker and slap your legs very hard." Jenkins rattled on: the go-to bank, the go-to bank, the go-to bank. Got it? Later that day Barclays announced that, while the millionaire bosses were getting enormous bonuses, the bank was making 12,000 minions redundant. Barclays – the go to the JobCentre bank.

SO farewell, Shirley Temple, not only the sweetest child ever to emerge from Hollywood but one of the first names I ever learned. If you were a boy, born in the 1950s and had a tousled shock of blonde curls, you got used to the big kids addressing you as: "Oi, Shirley bloody Temple."

IMAGINE if this week some bright agent rang a Hollywood producer and said: "Hey, we've got this cute little five-year-old girl who entertains grown ups by dancing in really short skirts." Temple was a creature of another age. We don't go there any more.

HOW far we have travelled. Deselected MP Tim Yeo blames his downfall on "extreme" Tory activists. Who could have imagined when this Tory-led government was created in 2010, that within four years a Conservative Party member who believed that Britain should be governed from Westminster rather than Brussels, and considered marriage to be a union of a man and a woman would be an extremist?

"CAN'T wait for that feeling when you just killed someone," is the tweet from a British Muslim in Syria. He is one of dozens of UK Muslims who have gone to fight the so-called holy war. Yet the prisoners he was hoping to execute were not President Assad's troops but fellow rebels who happened to belong to another movement. These are Muslims slaughtering Muslims and rejoicing in it. In what demented mind-set can anyone believe that committing murders like these somehow makes God happy? When news first broke of these young Muslims going to fight for freedom, it sounded reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War, something romantic and heroic like a Hemingway novel. Today it looks less like For Whom the Bell Tolls and more like Lord of the Flies. There is nothing like a guerilla war for releasing your inner psychopath.

AFTER this week's item on the importance of Bible study, a reader recalls the RI class when the teacher asked: "Who was not pleased to see the return of the prodigal son? One child replied: "The fatted calf."