They're a rum thing, these public consultations.

The idea behind them is the devolution of decision making to the people that it directly affects. A shining beacon of democracy to cut through our convoluted corridors of power.

But in reality, the people who govern us don't really want to be told how they should do so. They're all for elections, where once every few years they can pound the street, knock on doors and fill the airwaves with the sound of their voices. But what they really want is for us to then leave them alone to get on with making the big decisions that they're so much better qualified to make.

As we welcome two new reader-bloggers (Rog T and Jonty) into the Times Series family, I feel that now is as good a time as any to muse on part of the online experience - reader participation.

For me one of the most interesting elements of the website is the dialogue it allows between the news, reporters and readers. In print, this is a very flat relationship, with a handful of interested parties given a chance to respond - positively or negatively - to the issues of the previous week.

On the website you can comment on our stories as soon as they go up. You can comment on our blogs, we can respond to the comments. You can leave tributes to victims of crime. You can argue between yourselves (as some do more often than others). And you can take part in setting the agenda.

It's not nice being an amoeba. Unfortunately, in the journalistic food chain, that's just what trainee reporters on local newspapers are.

That fact was drummed into me on Friday when I went to meet Boris Johnson at the Hendon police training college. Also in attendance was a surprisingly scruffy crew from Sky News and a very sharply dressed chap from LBC radio. Maybe they're confused about the different type of media they work in.

The term ‘multiculturalism’ has become confused and complicated in discourse on the subjects of ethnicity and integration in recent years.

From Trevor Phillips’ call for the expression to be ditched altogether precisely because of the confusion surrounding it, to the declarations of various right-wing parties and organizations that it has 'failed’, multiculturalism, semantically at least, lives in increasingly muddy waters.

Undoubtedly, it is something that means many different things to many different people. But Thursday’s Multicultural Day at the Barnet Multicultural Centre in West Hendon rendered the debate unimportant, for an afternoon at least, as people of so many different ethnic and religious backgrounds came together for what was essentially a good old knees-up.

One of the long term aims of the Government and the police is not just to cut crime itself but also the fear of crime, which has increased in recent years even as crime rates fall.

Last month, Labour MP David Taylor told a House of Commons debate on the issue: "The British crime survey for 2007 records overall crime falling by 32 per cent since 1997 and 5.5 million fewer victims than in 1995.

"Yet fear of crime continues to paralyse too many lives, both old and young alike."

The Home Office website has this to add: "We believe everybody has the right to feel safe as they go about their daily lives."

Quite so, but not if you're Jewish and you live in Barnet.

In the USA, home of UFOs, aliens, the X Files and all things paranormal, it is the quaint town of Roswell that has apparently drawn the attention of visitors from other planets.

Quite why they would travel light-years in spaceships only to forego the obvious appeals of the world's wonders in favour of an unremarkable town of 50,000 in New Mexico is beyond me. But then, I'm no alien.