SOMETIMES this is a funny place in which to sit and watch the world go by. Same spot on a Thursday and it’s him again, fulminating about this and that, but mostly that.

As columns tend to deal in certainties, it would be easy to assume I always know my mind about everything. Not so, really. It just perhaps ends up looking that way when the words have been knocked into shape.

So I thought it would be interesting to tackle a subject on which my opinions are a little confused. This is the wearing of burqas or niqabs, the face-covering veils adopted by some Islamic women.

France’s lower house recently passed a law banning the wearing of the full Islamic veil, although this may yet not reach the statute book. Over here, or more precisely in Kettering, a Tory MP wants a similar law enacted, and also has said he will not speak to constituents who arrive at his surgery with their face covered in “burqas or balaclavas”. So if you turn up wearing both, you have definitely had it.

This is rather strange behaviour from Philip Hollobone, the MP in question. That said, I know little about Kettering, having visited once, which proved sufficient.

As a liberal-minded person, I am faced with a dilemma on this one. No, not Kettering but the burqa. For surely we should be able to wear what we like in a public place, so long as it isn’t indecent or likely to cause offence. So in that sense, burqas should be permitted, along with other outward manifestations of religion, such as crosses or those beards worn by some Orthodox Jews. Come to think of it, a full beard invading a face is pretty much a self-grown burqa.

So let these women cover their faces. After all, the state can hardly go about policing what we all wear. Anyway, some people pass among us dressed with astonishing lack of care or style, exposing bits of themselves that might be better hid, especially those rolls of jellied flesh that wobble free between overstretched jeans and inadequate T-shirts (on either sex).

Or they illuminate their skin with garish and indelible doodles. But my colleague of the columns, Andrew Hitchon, has already addressed tattoos this week, so we shall pass that one by.

The liberal person has to agree that burqas should and cannot ever be banned. Having said that, the burqa is an extreme interpretation of the Islamic preference for modesty. So should our liberalism act in support of something that seems so very illiberal? In the end, yes – or so insists the hectoring liberal making an annoying fuss inside of me.

Except that it’s a shame when women cover their faces, isn’t it? How dull the world would be if all women curtained off their faces. And if that strays towards being a sexist comment, oh well, there we go.

If we are liberal, we have to allow things – even those which perhaps strike us as strange and maybe even alien; we have to tolerate that which we may find difficult.

It occurs to me that this risks becoming one of those peculiar debates on probably unimportant matters the British are so good at. Remember all those endless hours spent arguing about foxhunting – wasn’t there something more worthwhile to get exercised about?

More recently, we have had all that embittered dreariness in the Church of England about women being appointed as bishops. Was there ever a less interesting debate to be had? Perhaps the church should instead ask if it even needs bishops at all, of whatever alignment.

You will not need reminding about the link between burqas and bishops. Yes, the peculiarities of religions, and not for the first time.

Incidentally, the first novel by veteran crime writer PD James was called Cover Her Face, which was not a comment on burqas (it was 1962, after all) but a literary reference to the Duchess of Malfi, the play by John Webster. As a quick Google just confirmed.