Apparently Baroness Mary Warnock has been attacked by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips for changing her mind. Baroness Warnock, now 81, has had a distinguished career as a head teacher, academic, moral philosopher, and public servant. Melanie Phillips is most well-known for expressing her opinions in various newspapers. What’s most upset Ms Phillips is that Baroness Warnock has modified her views about the integration of children with special educational needs in mainstream schools.

I’ve always been keen on trees. I’ve planted them whenever I’ve had the space. Thirty years ago, I lived near Oxford, where I planted a balsam poplar. It smelt gorgeous after it rained. I’d love to know if it’s still there – someone might have cut it down. A year ago, the Green Light Trust had a stall at our village fete. The trust supports and encourages those who want to establish community woodlands – woods planted by and for local people.

A Humanist point of view – Suffolk Inter-Faith Resource Forum of Faiths The dictionary definition of democracy is: ‘a system of government or organisation in which the citizens or members choose leaders or make other important decisions by voting; a country in which the citizens choose their government by voting.’ It’s not as simple as that; there are many forms of ‘democracy’, and many self-styled ‘democrats’ who are anything but.

Whatever you think about Iraq, and the reasons it’s in a mess, you surely can’t help but admire the courage of the Iraqis who risked their lives to vote for an interim government. At one polling station, a suicide bomber killed himself and a policeman, and badly injured a number of voters. Despite this, they cleaned up the body parts and carried on queuing. Can you imagine anyone doing the same in this country?

From 1911 to 1986 coalminers relied on canaries to warn them of dangerous gases. The birds were taken down the pits in cages and if they showed signs of distress, the men knew they must get out quickly. Canaries react to very small quantities of deadly carbon monoxide. They were made redundant when cheaper and more reliable electronic gas detectors were introduced. The miners missed the canaries, which were treated as pets

I tend to take the name of this slot literally, so I offer some thoughts for today. Today is the 8th January 2005, at the beginning of the 6th year of the 21st century, and we (by ‘we’, I mean the human race) have enormous potential, vast resources, and great knowledge. So why do we make things so difficult for ourselves? I often try to imagine what a highly intelligent alien from another part of the universe would think, if she or he were to come and see how we carry on.

Are you hungry? I am a little – haven’t had breakfast yet – but I’m not worried because I know I’ll get something to eat within an hour. Why do I ask? A few thousand years ago, before they changed the name of the midwinter festival, it was a time when rituals were performed to ensure the return of the sun. The death and rebirth of the sun mattered very much to people who feared that if the days didn’t lengthen again, they wouldn’t be able to grow the crops they relied on for their survival.

My friend Yvonne says she asked herself, why go through the same routine as lots of other people over the festive season, and decided enough was enough. She remembered the magic of a child’s Christmas when she was young, with a stocking and presents like new jumpers hand-knitted by kind aunties, but she couldn’t see that it was good for families to ‘beggar themselves’, as she put it, to meet rising expectations these days.

I hate it when I get included in things without my permission. For example; in a recent radio programme (not on Radio Suffolk), the presenter, who said he lived in the countryside, gave the impression that most of us who live in the country are angry about the hunting ban. “Not true!” I yelled at the radio. I take exception to being associated by default with those who demonstrated outside parliament a few weeks ago, since no one’s ever bothered to ask my opinion, and I get the impression that the subject doesn’t get much of an airing in my countryside neighbourhood anyway.

I swear, dear listener, that I don’t earn a penny from the BBC for saying nice things about them. I don’t even get paid for getting out of my lovely warm bed at some ungodly hour to come and talk to you. Well, it’d have to be ungodly, because I’m totally ungodly, or god-free. So it gives me great pleasure to tell you that next Monday the BBC begins what it describes as ‘the first ever television history of disbelief’ with Jonathan Miller on BBC4.