In Monday’s Times you may have spotted that a woman who nipped into WH Smith in Cambridge to buy a packet of cigarettes couldn’t. She couldn’t, because the shop assistant was a Muslim, and it was against her religion to sell tobacco. Fine, but that is not, in Wednesday’s Times, my point: my point is that WH Smith said: the customer should have realised the assistant was Muslim and would not sell tobacco.

A bizarre commercial policy, you may think, to employ salespeople who can’t sell things, but that isn’t my point, either. My point is: where does WH Smith get off expecting everyone in Fenland to know that Muslims mustn’t sell fags? In our exponentially diversifying multiculture — followers of the Bulgarian Orthodox church will be disembarking here any minute now, and may well, for all I know, or don’t, not be permitted to use handkerchiefs in public — should it be demanded of us that we read every word of the small print of everyone else’s beliefs and traditions?

I was watching BBC news last night, which not only reported that a Muslim policewoman had refused on religious grounds to shake hands with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but also invited viewers to phone in and babble their views. Thousands, of course, rang up, as thousands always will at such prompting, and while some of them, no doubt, hoped to win a cruise to Acapulco or a chance to join the news team of cheeky girls and shriek at them until voted off by viewers, one of them at least had something worth saying; which, at the end of the news, we were told he had said. He said: “As an orthodox Jew, I totally support the Islamic policewoman.”

Which surprised me a bit, until I phoned an observant friend who told me that orthodox Jewish women do not shake hands with men, either. I didn’t know that, did you? WH Smith would expect you to. Indeed, it is probably worth inquiring, before popping into your local branch, whether the shaven-headed assistant in the saffron robe and fingerbells is allowed by Buddha to sell you a bottle of Quink. And if, on the bus home, you give up your seat to a strap-hanging Hindu grannie, will all hell break loose at the gross offence you have unwittingly caused by suggesting she sit in your male dent?

No transport is easy, these days. In Tuesday’s Times we learnt of a poor sap who is suing Qantas for chucking him off its London plane because he was wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt. And had it been a cross? A Rastafarian wristband? An Old Etonian tie? A white yarmulke open to doubt as to whether he was the Pope, and thus likely to offend atheist passengers, or merely an Adelaide rabbi supporting a Plymouth Brother’s right not to appear on CCTV because God had forbidden his image to be graven?

Do I believe in Donald Rumsfeld? I do not know, and if I did, I wouldn’t dare say. I know only that every day brings more things we do not know we do not know.

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