A new poll published on Monday raises eyebrows. Just when Belfast is in the news for those disgraceful attacks on Romanians, this poll claims it's the friendliest city in the United Kingdom. Almost a third of respondents there said they were likely to talk daily to their neighbours, compared with a tenth in Edinburgh. Nearly a fifth thought their neighbours friends (one in a hundred thought so in London). How, commentators have asked, do you square this with violence against the Romanians?

Easily. Actually they reinforce each other. In a Blackpool taxi some years ago I asked the driver if the town was a nice place to live, even out of season.

“Fantastic!” he said. “Especially out of season. So friendly. For example, a black man came to live here and bought a local pub. Well, our community wasn't having that; not here; not a black. So word got round among friends and neighbours to boycott the business. Soon nobody drank there. The black man went bankrupt and left. Yes - really good community spirit here in Blackpool.”

And he meant it. Three cheers for a countering (and ancient) strand of English sentiment that remains distinctly cool about community, neighbours and relations.

Praise be

On Saturday in Derbyshire in the village of Cromford I opened the annual summer festival and presented prizes. More memorably, the Cromford tug-o'-war team pulled a five-tonne steaming and whistling steamroller up Cromford Hill to the Bell pub, to be rewarded with a free pint. Another part of the festival was to be a blessing the following morning at a Greek Orthodox chapel down a path through the yard at Pisani's marble and granite works, just below the A6. So I went.

Outside a tiny stone chapel, decorated with copies of icons, a Greek Orthodox priest - massive beard, gowns and all - was dipping a gold cross into the spring nearby, then cupping water and spattering it, using a straw brush, over the handful gathered: possibly the entire Greek Orthodox population of Matlock and district - dressed British and looking British but, like exiles, muttering unfamiliar responses and crossing themselves repeatedly with an unusual four-part sign of the Cross: forehead, left side, right shoulder, left shoulder.

“I made this chapel,” Costas Sakellarios, the boss of Pisani's, told me “to thank God for letting me buy the company in 1996. We have not consecrated it, so that all faiths can feel comfortable here.”

It was a glorious morning. Birdsong mingled with the murmur of worshippers and rush of traffic through the trees; and beneath it all the sounds of recorded sung responses and the splash of the Cross rattling on to the stones in the spring. The pub, my silly speech, the children's art and writing competition, the steamroller, the sweating youths pulling the rope... at times I'm moved almost to tears by the beautiful unconnectedness of things.

Criminal idea

Yesterday's debate on the Iraq inquiry showed MPs at their most brave and honest. I'm sure disillusion over the way we were led into Iraq is among the subliminal sources of the recent spasm of popular indignation with politics. And now, among the consequences, one of the silliest ideas I've heard since the Dangerous Dogs Act - and horribly typical of Gordon Brown's demented dirigisme: a criminal law to deal with parliamentary impropriety. Oh come off it, Gordon: fraud is already a criminal offence. Another piece of redundant, top-of-a-beermat, send-out-a-message legislation.

What will placing alleged dodgy expenses claims (or undeclared interests) in the hands of the police achieve? It will slow everything down, bring in hordes of lawyers, open the way to endless appeals and vastly reduce the chances of securing a guilty verdict. With the accused's inevitable defence being innocent mistake, the introduction of juries and the “beyond all reasonable doubt” hurdle can only bring uncertainty. What's needed is speedy inquiry by an independent body, crisp and summary judgment, and no appeal. The available tariff already ranges right up to the effective wrecking of the accused MP's political career. Nothing more is required. A flailing PM trying to look decisive is a ludicrous but dangerous beast.

Firing blanks

I've found the picture of my mother, waving placards with my toddler sister and our African gardener's child, demonstrating outside the Rhodesian Parliament against Ian Smith's closure of schools for black servants' children in the white suburbs of (as it was) Salisbury. Or, rather, I've found the big white space on the front page of the next morning's Rhodesia Herald. Those scary blank spaces did Smith so much harm. Censorship by conspicuous blocking is PR idiocy. Parliamentary “redactors” please note.

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