Peter Rhodes: Challenging a taboo

MANY thanks to those of you who sent explanations for my query about printer-ink cartridges. There is little agreement. Skipping through your emails, it seems the yellow ink cartridge runs out first because: 1) Yellow is used to make other colours. 2) You're printing too many images of Donald Trump's hair. 3) Yellow is used in skin tones. 4) Yellow is used to highlight documents. 5) Yellow is a thin pigment and needs a thicker coat.

THE explanation I really like is one reader's claim that each sheet of paper you print carries a unique, very faint pattern in yellow. This pattern can be used to identify every printer in the world, to prevent counterfeiting. The pattern is normally invisible but you can detect it using a magnifying glass. I am tempted to have a look but I fear the pattern would read: "You really are a gullible prat, aren't you?"

MOHAMMED Rashid is blind and for the past three years has been seen around his Birmingham home with Solo, his guide dog. Mr Rashid has been presented with a volunteering award by Guide Dogs for promoting the charity but some fellow Muslims are not so charitable. Some have accused him of not being a proper Muslim. At the heart of this row is the position of dogs in Islam. As so often in faith issues, opinions vary; put three religious scholars together and you'll get four opinions. But as a rule, dogs are seen as unclean and unfit to live in a Muslim house. Touch a dog and, according to some scholars, you should wash seven times. And yet I recall landing in the Maldives, a Muslim state, where the first creatures we encountered were a pack of amiable springer spaniels bouncing over the luggage and sniffing for drugs. Clearly, the rules can be interpreted in different ways and guide dogs are a relatively recent thing. I can't believe there is anything in Islam that would deny a blind Muslim the companionship and help of any of God's creatures.

WHILE dogs are frowned upon, Islamic scholars cherish cats as wise, pure-spirited and clean. They really ought to meet mine.

ISLAMIC tradition also suggests that while cats may share our homes, it is wrong to buy or sell them. They should only be given and received as gifts.

IT is bizarre that a nation entirely surrounded by the sea has virtually ignored the steady, reliable and almost limitless power of the tides for generating electricity. A million squandered tides have risen and fallen while we have faffed around with burning coal, splitting the atom and cluttering the countryside with enormous windmills in pursuit of volts. Now, at last, there is a viable £1.3 billion plan to enclose the tidal lagoon at Swansea and generate clean, green electricity for hundreds of years. May it be the first of many.

AND before anyone asks what about the poor wading birds and other wildlife which inhabit the lagoon and may find their habitat disturbed, tough luck. No-one asked them to be waders. There are times, and this is one of them, when humans should do what every other species on this planet does, and put its own interests first. Go and wade somewhere else.