Sauce for the goose...

It's good to have the Excess back, but I'm still having withdrawal symptoms from the Nuntii Cantabrigienses.

The Christmas messages in the CEN were interesting. There was a message from an Anglican priest and a Catholic one, all well and good. This year there was a third one at the bottom of the page which caught the corner of my eye, and I expected it to be from a rabbi, a cleric from the religion in which the historical Jesus lived and died: He was the Jews' Christmas present to the world, and there have been several rabbis on various pauses for thought on Radio 2 during Advent.

The third message was, in fact, from an imam. He wished us all season's greetings, which was nice, but also took time to express his surprise at the amount of pagan symbols and festivals which had been subsumed into Christianity. I'd have went to the foot of our stairs, if I wasn't downstairs already. Doesn't he know the origins of the holiest place in Islam, the Ka'aba?

Still, I'm sure the gentle imam was sincere in his good wishes, and nobody said anybody was a slave of anybody else. But was the absence of a Jewish voice an oversight, or was there nobody available - or was it a manifestation of the sustained low-level anti-Semitism that exemplifies the creeping Islamicisation of the UK?