Daughter Ericka has unintentionally contributed to the 'To veil or not to veil that is the question' debate by once more intimating that she wants her nose pierced. My stock reply that she needs this like she needs a hole in her head met with the usual withering look, though I always maintain she would be left with an unsightly nasal hole, which will leak in inclement weather. [One is reminded of Spike Milligan's great verse: "The stars are holes where the rain gets in / The holes are small that's why the rain is thin."]

The standard second line of defence for any untoward teenage proposal - 'over my dead body' - failed to end the matter as it used to, and perhaps I ought to abandon an putative option that is clearly becoming both a possibility and also an end not entirely undesired at times by one's nearest and assumed dearest.

But then Helen intervened - helpful as ever! - to remind me that I believed I had once read that Asian women use the nose stud to divert the lustful gaze of the irrepressibly lascivious male from the treacherous pools of the eyes towards the far less exotic nose, thus quelling all Bad Thoughts. That being so, she concluded, would I not rather Ericka took such a preventive chastity measure, howsoever disfiguring it might be?

No Odysseus was ever caught between such twin perils of monstrous Scylla and terrible Charybdis as a poor male between a mother and a teenage daughter. Helen was right of course in principle that anything that reduced the likelihood of Ericka coming to the blighted attention of the local feral youth would have my innate blessing, yet it was clear that giving my imprimatur, as it were, to indelible body art would open as many chambers of horrors as it would close.

Mercifully Ericka came to my rescue - as no doubt Helen knew she would - by yukking the whole idea of doing anything that might lessen her standing in the eyes of the boys of the village, however horrid and undesirable they all actually were. [On that at least we are agreed.]

So nose piercing is off the agenda for now, thank goodness, though the matter has made me reflect as to whether wearers of the niqab are, indeed, having the cake that they eat. Modest most certainly, yet free to twinkle, sparkle and seduce with their eyes to the endless delight and ruin of men.

And so to Mattins