Now this is an extra for website readers only as it was never broadcast. I think there was a death of some public figure around that time, which meant that one of the bosses in Religious Broadcasting had to do a quick eulogy and schedules were changed, and when I got into the studio there were two of us waiting to do our thing. I wasn't that bothered about the wasted effort (or in the light of Zeno, I wasn't really sure at what point the effort I put into these scripts becomes wasted), but here it surfaces again, so perhaps it wasn't wasted after all.

In his speech to the Centre for the Open Society in London yesterday, Robin Cook highlighted recent controversy over the prospect of racism being used as a political issue in the forthcoming election campaign. And as usual, the word alone served to generate more heat than light around the subject.

The problem is that it means different things to different people, and it’s not always to do with skin colour. It’s more to do with suggesting that there are norms of a majority within our borders so inherently superior that we should try to exclude all difference.

Now when the East Yorkshire MP John Townend, accused immigrants of undermining the UK’s “homogenous Anglo-Saxon society” earlier this month, he even forgot to include the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

Neither are we too important to Richard Body MP who has written a book called “England for the English”. He argues against the erosion of “English culture”, but as usual, the difficulty lies in defining just what ‘culture’ means, and just what it should exclude. How do we define the parameters of who is “one of us”?

One of the lesser known of Zeno’s paradoxes was a proposal for an experiment in which a cup of wine is poured into an empty barrel. Then water is added one drop at a time, and the challenge is to decide just which drop turns the wine into no more than flavoured water. Of course there’s no precise point of transformation, even though the contents have quite clearly changed by the time that the barrel is full.

Culture is much the same, and so is colour. Dark brown, light brown, sun-bronzed or peely-wally, how many of us play the bagpipes, toss the caber, or wear the kilt, and does that really make us any less Scottish? Surely there’s something more subtle about the Scottishness you share with your neighbours. And I ask you, what do you really want from your neighbour, a fair skin-tone or kindness and generosity?

“And of God’s signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the variety of your tongues and colours. Surely in that are signs for all living beings.” Says the Qur’an.