Recycled - An Earlier Morality: not nice, not nice at all

When the Anglo-Saxons caught a Dane robbing a Church, they would skin him alive and nail his skin to the Church door, as at Copford in Essex, U.K.

In Viking Skaldic Poetry (or verse) carving the 'blood-eagle' on a defeated opponent was a cruel and hideous form of execution.

In Graham Greene's novel "Our Man in Havana", Captain Segura, of the Cuban police, has a leather-covered cigarette case on which he carefully taps his cigarettes before smoking. The leather covering is, in fact, the skin of the man who tortured and killed Segura's mother and father.

Captain Segura, "mon semblable, mon frere"! I'd happily buy him a drink or two and discuss Catholic morality with him.

Such behaviour is now seen as 'unacceptable', to use the cant phrase of modern would-be moralists, who bat not an eyelid when similar is done to 'the products of conception'.

My Grandmother had and used, during the last war, a chamber pot with a portrait of Hitler glazed into the bottom. Better than nothing I suppose.

I would need at least half a dozen. And whose portraits? That would be telling, but I have a little list..

And you? Have you a little list?