regular readers will know that just after the Yorkshire Dales, Northumbria comes right up there on my list of 'most beautiful places in the world'. So I was heartened by this campaign to return to the Northumbrian nation their most precious relic. By way of t'Grauniad. They don't quite say 'we recognise no king but a Percy king', but they obviously mean it.

Forty pilgrims braved the bitterly cold weather to walk eight miles in the footsteps of the monks who carried the body of St Cuthbert from Chester-le-Street to Durham. The march was organised by the Northumbrian Association as part of its campaign to have the Lindisfarne Gospels returned to the region from the British Library in London. The manuscripts were created by Eadfrith the monk on Lindisfarne and dedicated to St Cuthbert, Northumberland's patron saint, who died in 687. They were intended to stay in Durham cathedral with St Cuthbert's body, but were taken by Henry VIII in 1537 and have been kept at the British Library since the nineteenth century. Northumbrian Association treasurer John Danby told the Newcastle Journal: "The Gospels were written in the north-east and were meant to stay here. They're part of our history and heritage. "The British Library has claimed we wouldn't be able to look after the Gospels and have said scholars wouldn't be willing to travel to the north-east to visit them," he said. "But as one of our members pointed out, we invented the railway for them to travel here." The gospels were seen by 180,000 people while they were on loan in the north-east in 2001.

It's a bit earlier than usual this year, but all the news services are carrying stories about the identity of Jack t'Ripper finally being solved. One would think, what with international terrorism, knife crime and various other little problems going on, that the Scotland Yard announcement might not have been such a great idea. The Swanson Marginalia at the heart of this have been known about for years. They're in Begg (who broadly favours the Swanson suspect, Kosminski), they're in Sugden, they're well known on the most authoritative online source, the Casebook. So why the hoopla? Something nasty coming out of the woodpile again? Or just that the Met are so incapable of solving modern crime, they're desperate to trumpet the fact they can solve something from 1888? (not that they have of course, they want to look at William Bury)

I don't know very much. No, don't stop me... Oh, you weren't. But I know two things. Call them lessons from history. 1) England don't win on penalties. Ever. And therefore should never play for them. 2) No one, but no one, invades Afghanistan and wins. Just not possible. Just don't even think about it. You might look like you've won, but give it a few months, and you're trapped in the mountains while some christian-god-forsaken-goat eater runs rings round you. How the Ruskies must be laughing now.

It's a truism on the web that journalists (and, by implication, most of the population) don't understand the sciences. The old 'two cultures' of CP Snow gets dragged out with monotonous regularity. Worstall concentrates often on the lack of understanding of economics. There's numerous sites dedicated to the lack of understanding of statistics (including this one when it comes to DVR). And underlying it all is a view that hacks are arts graduates, who have to be lectured on elementary numbers. Unfortunately, most hacks aren't that much better at history, whether modern or ancient. Maybe I just notice it more given a history-reliant background (well, I did do economics too, but I try and forget about it). I don't really blame the hacks in question, it's just too easy to re-write PRs, fail to do any research and repeat vaguely remembered myths from school. And, while the TV fascination with the subject continues, it's usually in terms of 'celebrity family history' or the even worse 'celebrity egomaniac with a book to sell' (see Starkey, Holmes, Crucikshank), rather than any attempt to provide us with a contextual overview of whence we all came. Which leads me to Labour MP Gordon Marsden's attack on school teaching of history, for its 'Yo Sushi' style. By which he means taking little bits, rather than looking at the overview. I'm not sure why he thinks this is anything new. Any historical museum knows that Tudors, Victorians and WWII are sure bankers to base entire education programmes and interpretations around. Every year students will do those subjects while ignoring large swathes of the rest of our island history (never mind the history of Europe or the rest of the world--hey, you ever heard of any English ECW school course that puts it in the context of the Thirty Years' War? Thought not...) Most of us studied small or large chunks or bits without having any sort of overview. And, while he recognises that the problem is one with Britishness, and defining it, there's no solution offered beyond the usual Labourite nostrums. Of course, he quotes the requisite trendy-lefty notion that we should study how waves of immigration contributed to Britain since the sixteenth century. But that's just another chunk (albeit a useful one), replacing one type of prescriptive schooling with another. Underlying it all we have to look at how history has been used and abused, as image, ideology and excuse, throughout, uhhr, history. Which might explain why the journalists who refer to it insist on repeating the same cliches and simplifications again and again. History, after all, he postmodernises, doesn't exist outside of books and TV programmes and half-remembered facts. It's all a myth. Now that's a school course that would get them leaving in droves.

Hey, I'm as happy to criticise Blair as the next man, but not over some shock horror over the type of bullets used. Dum-dum bullets (invented like most good things, by the British (though not concentration camps for which we're usually blamed, we just invented the name)) were banned from international warfare in 1899 because of the lingering death they caused to soldiers. In war situations, it is sometimes not possible to treat someone suffering from bullet wounds. Clean, 'full metal jackets' give a chance of clean wounds. Dum dum bulllets don't. The associated notion was that armies would deliberately seek to maim rather than kill because of the drag on resources this would cause. At the time, this was reprehensible and the bullets were banned. Now, of course, it's standard policy by most post_Cold War armies (and much Cold War strategy on both sides was based on causing woulnds to slow the other side down, rather than deaths which wouldn't). The same issues don't apply with the Police. They use dum-dum bullets because there is less risk of hitting by-standers, because the bullets will slow down and disintegrate on contact with a target, rather than going through and potentially hitting someone else. And there isn't the ethical issue, because in any Police situation, the victim/perp can be delivered to hospital tout de suite. Fake outrage doesn't make a story.