Green is the colour of Islam, of course. It is also the traditional colour of Sinn Fein/IRA. When London was being blown to bits by the republicans, one could buy a green ribbon to show solidarity with their noble aims.

So, in a sense, the £2,000 of public funds that was authorised by Nottinghamshire’s top policeman is indeed money well spent: his officers will be showing solidarity with not just one but two communities.

Explaining his decision to a perplexed local population, Chief Constable Green said that Muslims were “being held hostage by fear”. This is something he knows a bit about: a while ago he confessed, almost tearfully, that his own police force was being held hostage by fear. Under Green’s stewardship, the murder rate in Nottingham has much increased. “We are reeling with the murders. We are in a long-standing crisis situation with major crime,” he said, adding that he might have to “farm out” murder inquiries to neighbouring forces. Perhaps the rest of us should wear navy blue ribbons to show solidarity with the Nottinghamshire police.

I suppose some people might find it a little sinister that the politically neutral police should have started making such a public declaration of allegiance. If you were gay, for example, you might wonder if the green ribbon meant that the entire police force supported Islam’s rigorous approach to homosexuality. Perhaps Green should order some pink ribbons for his men, just to clear up the matter. You can wear ribbons today to assert your affection or opposition to anything.

There is evidence, though, that those who wear them do not sign up to whatever laudable philosophical treatise was intended: those anti-bullying wristbands, for instance. Outside my local junior school I saw one boy wearing seven of them, a collection amassed by the simple expedient of kicking the heads in of any kid he saw wearing one: the wristband as an ironic post-modernist statement.

Green should be warned: you don’t want Muslims to think that the police are taking the mickey by wearing a green ribbon in an ironic manner. If that happened, we could have real trouble on our hands.

Less raunchy more paunchy

Mickey Rourke was photographed leaving a nightclub last week with some doe-eyed Ukrainian moppet attached to his arm. The moppet’s extremely handsome youthful boyfriend was also photographed, looking thoroughly miffed, as well he might. It is not pleasant to have your girlfriend pulled from under your nose by some bloated, monosyllabic old actor. The babe was pictured coldly sending a text to her now ex from her mobile phone, along the lines of dosvidanya, mate.

The whole business is rather cheering. It doesn’t matter how hideous you become or even how stupid (I’ve read Mickey’s interviews): women are endlessly mysterious and can conjure lust from the deepest barrel. Mickey’s barrel is pretty deep by now: he is no longer the Motorcycle Boy from Rumble Fish or even the yuppie who gave Kim Basinger a lesson in fridge maintenance in 9½ Weeks. He is, instead, a paunchy, addled old git. For those of us who share these characteristics: Mickey, we salute you.

Heading to hell if you say Happy Christmas

There is a rather beautiful address about the London bombings on the front page of one of Britain’s largest Islamic websites, SunnahOnline. The writer, Abu Eesa, speaks of his “utter revulsion” at the terrorist attacks and offers advice to Muslim and non-Muslim alike: “We must afford our fellow non-Muslim citizens more honour and dignity than we currently do . . . they have looked after us well in this country.” He tells non-Muslims of his sadness and repugnance at the bombings.

The same website carries an article by a chap called Abu Abdillaah Muhammad Al-Jibaaly. It is a powerful polemic against decadent western behaviour: “The disbelievers are misguided and their ways are based on sick or deviant views.” Those who imitate the ways of the disbeliever will, he insists, abide in hell fire. The decadent behaviour: taking the dog for a walk, watching a football match or wishing your Christian neighbours a happy Christmas.

• Good news from an American biotechnology magazine. Spam, or something like it, can now be grown in a Petri dish, rather than hacked from the insides of a pig. Soon they will be able to grow bits of chicken in a lab too, rather than cultivating beakless blind alien creatures as happens at present. It will all present a terrible conundrum for vegetarians, who will have to play an introspective game of animal, vegetable and mineral every time they glance at a menu. The rest of us, meanwhile, will be reduced to eating bacterial slime. The days of Soylent Green — the sci-fi film in which people subsisted on reconstituted human corpses — are not so far away.

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