I'd echo what Mr Smith said in his letter. The air may be changed frequently but you could be jammed in that plane in close proximity to hundreds of coughing and sneezing people for hours on end. As a pilot you're just not exposed to that (although I guess the cabin crew are).

Planes can be an international clearing house for germs. It seems to me that somebody from the other side of the world could be spreading germs that are uncommon in your neck of the woods and to which you might therefore have little resistance.

You say:

"Is this really a letter from the U.S. or a letter from the British government to the High Court?"

I notice there are American spellings ('endeavors' rather than 'endeavours'). Are you suggesting the letter is a British forgery?

Cheesy, yes, but its great virtue was that it never took itself too seriously - there was always an undercurrent of self-deprecating humour running through it which, let's face it, you need when all the men's trousers are too short and the women are in micro-skirts and you KNOW that the guys in the red shirts are not long for this world.

And for that reason, I never liked any of the subsequent series - too many ACTORS trying to be profound and meaningful.

I'm sure there's nothing wrong with the air, but the fact remains that you're crammed in a tin box for hours on end with hundreds of other people from all over the place, some of whom will be spreading germs. That must make it more likely you could become infected yourself. Pilots, in their own compartment, are insulated from that.

It's not the airlines' or the pilots' fault and I don't know what you can do about it apart from not fly.

Do you think they're stupid?

It's obviously not real but that's not the point. Like it or not, giving birth while still at school is not cool. That's the message it's getting across.

Kids will see this and understand the point; it might not work, but they'll get it.

Here in Britain, any politician who would dare to talk about privatizing part or all of the NHS is asking for trouble. Our NHS is far from perfect and we moan about it all the time, but to trade in this cradle-to-grave, free at the point of delivery service for a privatized model like the US's would be unthinkable.

Because it's state-funded, there has to be some form of rationing and maybe some cutting-edge treatments are not available, and waiting lists for some procedures can be long, but for 99.99% of us, 99.99% of our medical needs are met by the NHS.

Of course, you can always buy private insurance as well if you want to queue jump, and some companies (like mine) provide medical insurance for staff for that reason. But even those of us with private insurance generally use the NHS (I've never used my private health scheme) because it's free and easy and you don't have to jump through the hoops and complete the tedious paperwork required by the insurer.

Of course, if you had a serious or chronic illness, your insurer may not even cover it and you'd get better care in the NHS anyway.

It's Labour Party and not Labor - it's a proper noun.

Or are we all Americans now?

Obama is lucid and charismatic and says all the right things. This is a great start - far better than the Bush administration ever managed. But, let's face it, he talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.

All this stuff about American fairness, decency, and so on, is just so much hot air all the time America denies due process to prisoners, suppresses evidence by presidential decree, and fails to prosecute torturers and murderers.

Yes, Obama is a welcome relief after Bush and Cheney, but he's still persisting with many of their policies.

Let's be clear: this unwillingness to try Guantanamo detainees in a proper court is not about fear of terrorism but about fear of embarrassment.

If the evidence is tainted and therefore impermissible because the detainee has been tortured or otherwise abused, then the prisoner goes free. Tough. That's the rule of law.

It's not about the threat to Americans these people present; most of them are probably guilty of no more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real threat is to the US's reputation: we cannot bring them to trial because WE TORTURED THEM and it would make us look bad when this comes out in court and the case is consequently dismissed.

Kamiya is right: until Obama publicly repudiates these outrages then America will never be able to put these dark episodes behind it.

I personally would rather saw my own arm off than spend one minute watching Britain's Got Talent, but my wife and daughter are fans. According to them, the reason Susan Boyle didn't win was for the prosaic but journalistically uninteresting reason that she just wasn't good enough.

She has a great voice, but not that great, and that's why she lost.

I always felt it was the names of the people and places that felt just so right that gave The Lord of the Rings much of its power.

You glimpsed the history of the world he was describing through the coherence and structure of its languages that only a philologist could invent.