SO IT'S BULLSH** BINGO IS IT???

Ben , my cultural mentor, says that the modern day web-filter (an IT function without flesh and blood) is prim and proper. Ben is not. He wore black Chelsea boots under his tuxedo at the Bollywood premieres when the self-respecting wore patent black pumps.

That said he knows his way around the Computer circuit. When he saw my eight-letter header he struck the asterisk-key twice. 'We wont get away with it.' He knows his way around the government sites and said that a blocking device would cut us out. So I reluctantly agreed but not before I had told him that the battle to stop replacing letters with astericks was fought by a man who was born a few street away for the Round Foundry office in which we were sitting, in Holbeck, Leeds.

Richard Hoggart, the father of Simon, was born in Hunslet Leeds and appeared for the publishers in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1962. Hoggart had written an excellent book called the Uses of Literacy and he was in the witness box to defend truth and wordplay.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, is a surprising book. If a second-hand first edition is dropped spine upwards it always falls open at the same pages. A reader of these learns of a tryst that the gamekeeper Mellows had with M'Lady. This involves him stroking her spine after she had cried watching some eggs hatch and an post coital-enthusiasm which he relayed by saying to her, 'Eh thou's a nice bit of ****.

At the trial the prosecutor said, 'Can you tell us what is the difference between the word' (he spoke the word in its full form) and 'f***'.

Hoggart replied, 'A nasty suggestiveness. '

I felt that he is right. These days language used crudely but honestly will only offend a small minority.