Halal Solly, it's so good to see you back where you belong...

My daughter went to some big concert at Wembley where all the artistes seem to have replaced their names with initials or similar - there was Jessie J and Cee Lo and J-Lo and even someone or something called LMFAO plus JLS, which I thought was a brand of cigarette.
As someone who still thinks LOL stands for lots of love (or little old lady) I find this all very confusing. Of course, it will mean I should be M-Sol and my brother Dave would be D-Sol but I think my brother Richard and daughter Rachel may have to find an alternative.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
So, there's this relatively successful Jewish secondary school where I grew up and, as the saying almost goes, you don't have to be Jewish to go there but...well, there's no but. You don't have to be Jewish to go there. Not any more.
 In fact, it is beginning to become a Jewish school for Muslims. Bizarre but this is what's happened.
 A quick bit of history. Redbridge used to have so many Jewish people - around one in five families at one point - that first they opened a grant-aided faith primary school for them, then another one and then a secondary school.
 Except that by the time the secondary school opened, most of the Jews had moved out of the area and their places were taken by Asian families and, predominantly, Muslim ones.
 Now for a while the schools were oversubscribed so only the most orthodox Jews were let in which meant the likes of me, from a mixed marriage and 'reformed' would not have been. This led to quite a lot of heartache and controversy.
 But, bit by bit, it become undersubscribed so, to survive, King Solomon secondary school had to widen its admissions policy.
 At first this meant kids with Jewish fathers but not mothers and then ones who weren't very Jewish but had Jewish ancestry, then when these ran out, any kid who could name one Barbra Steisand song and watch Fiddler on the Roof was allowed in.
 However, local Muslim families quite liked the discipline at King Solomon - it was the nearest thing they could find to Islamic discipline in a British school - and they looked at the academic record and thought, 'why can't we send out kids there?' And so they applied and they got in.
 Now you have something that sounds straight out of a comedy film with Muslim kids having to wear the Jewish skullcap and take Hebrew lessons in school, being met at the gates by mums in full Islam Hijabs to take them to the Mosque, all the while standing alongside Jewish women in their traditional orange fake tan, gold earrings and Juicy Couture tracksuits. Talk about a thin line between the two faiths, it's funny how they all drive silver or black cars.
 It's not totally without problems inside the school, I understand, with the kids mixing well for most lessons but then splitting into their ethnic groups in the playground, though the more open minded ones still try and get along.
 As far as I can see this can go one of two ways. It can become a happy mixture of racial diversity that sets a blueprint for a two-state agreement which will solve the Palestinian crisis or they'll erect a 27 metre steel wall through the middle of the playground while they argue over who gets to keep the occupied territory (ie the basketball net).
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Every time The Guardian does a story which mentions the Daily Mail it gets loads of comments spouting the kind of bile you wouldn't normally find outside...well, outside the Daily Mail actually. Clearly most Guardian readers would like the Mail closed down. And then the paper does a story about Murdoch and, guess what, they'd all like to see the burning down of every Murdoch paper as well. As for Desmond, well he's a porn baron so we shouldn't allow the Express and the Star.
The Indie's a joke (Jemima Khan. Say no more). So basically, Guardian readers would like the closure of every paper except its own. And they're not too keen on that either, not since it sold out and nailed its colours to the Liberal mast at the last election - a decision which, now, looks both ludicrous and hilarious at the same time.
But it is interesting in that if the Liberal/liberal middle class intelligentsia had their way you would have The Guardian and The Guardian alone for all the clever people and the Daily Mirror for all those horrid working class people.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Two clear signs that it's summer in the newspapers. This week saw the first 'grunting women tennis players' story of the season - some scientific guff about why women make lots of noise at moments of high excitement (not that I've ever heard it!)
Second, killer sharks off the coast of Cornwall. In the latest instalment a shark launched a Jaws-style attack on a boat. That's an attack in the style of a fictional shark as opposed to, say, in the style of a pirate ship coming alongside or in the style of a German U-boat firing a torpedo.
Now we've got reporters boarding fishing vessels to hunt the shark, in Jaws-style of course. Next reporter who uses the line 'we're going to need a bigger boat' should be chopped up and thrown overboard.
That's some bad hat Harry...Solly xx