I gave up reading The Times when it reduced itself to the size of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Infact, I gave up subscribing to a daily newspaper until The Independent came out in the early eighties. I liked its look and its tone, and when I discovered that my favourite humourist, Miles Kington, was writing a daily column in it, I became committed to ‘The Independent’.

Before The Independent, Kington used to write for Punch. It was in the ‘Punch’ that he began writing his ‘Franglais’ columns written in a comical mixture of English and French. These were later published in a series of books titled, Let’s Parlais Anglais.

Kington’s daily column was so original, so fresh and so diverse I used to read it in the evening as well. There wasn’t a subject from tea-towels to tonsillitis that he didn’t turn into a delightful pastiche. I once sent him a fan letter praising his beautifully observed take-off of Sir John Gielgud playing a cricket match and appealing to the umpire in the manner of King Lear delivering a speech on the heath. His reply was on a postcard; all it said was how much he had enjoyed listening to the ‘The Poet and the Nightingale’, a feature I had written and presented on BBC Radio III. There were many other occasions when I had the urge to write to him and say how much I had cherished reading a certain column but I didn’t, because I hadn’t written anything for Radio.

The unique aspect of Kington’s humour was that he never tried to be funny about anything which, as he put it, "was naturally funny like politics, unionism and sex. Things have to take themselves very seriously indeed before they can become funny."

I used to cut out his pieces to savour them during long air journeys. One of his piercingly funny articles was about navels.  I reproduce just a part of it:

"Other parts of the body are supposed to be funny or capable of being funny, but there is nothing particularly comic about the navel. For one thing it is about the most useless part of the body there is. You couldn’t be born without it, and you can’t do anything else with it. The day you are born and your umbilical cord is snipped, its usefulness is over. And for the rest of your life you carry it around as if it were an old sell-by date label you had forgotten to remove.

After that, the navel acquires characteristics which the great designer of the world never intended it to have. It has acquired a nick name, the ‘belly button’, which I suppose ranks it above the middle finger and the elbow, two bits of the body which I have never referred to lightly. Sometimes when little children are asking awkward questions about where babies come from, they are told that they come from their navel and indeed I have heard of young children rubbing navels mutually in order to achieve this mysterious miracle.

But what else? Well, people who are inward looking are often said to be contemplating their navel, which imputes a kind of hopelessness to the case. And what questions do they ask themselves when they contemplate this strange cavity, which l once described as the perfect place to put salt if you eat celery in the bath?

I was listening to a folk singer the other night -- you know what a folk singer is, don’t you? A folk singer is an artiste who performs passionately with his shirt open, right to the navel. Only they have no navel. This is the ultimate rejection of the mother….."

He was not just a humorist. He was an amazingly gifted journalist, playwright, broadcaster and a jazz lover. He played the piano, the trombone and the double bass.

Miles Kington who is now perhaps best known only for his quotation -- "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." -- died of cancer in 2008, but not before filing his final copy for The Independent. It is hard to imagine anyone writing a daily humourous/satirical column for well over twenty six years and keeping it as sharp and as zestful as he did.

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It seems like a bygone era but until the end of the 20th century your newspaper in England used to be delivered to your doorstep first thing in the morning. Nowadays you have to walk to your nearest supermarket to buy your daily newspapers, which is a chore. Even when I make the effort, the newspaper that I want has been sold out.

Last month, when I was in England, I carried the Sunday Times (now nearly as heavy as volume of the Encylopedia Brittanica) home and found in the magazine section a harrowing article by Yasmin Alibhai Brown on the plight of young Pakistani and Indian teenager girls now growing up in Britain.

Yasmin Alibhai Brown was another highly respectable journalist who contributed a regular weekly column in The Independent. She had already made a name for herself by writing for The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times. She always refers to herself as a Shia Muslim, but she doesn’t wear her label in her articles. In the Honours list of 2006 she was awarded the MOB (Member of Order of the British Empire) for services to Journalism but she returned the award, in protest of the Labour government’s conduct of the Iraq War.

The article is based on the hundreds of letters she receives from girls, distraught with fear, asking for her help. Here is one written by a mother.

"My English not so good. They want my six years old daughter wear the hijab. Where is says in Quran  a child  must do this? When I say no, they beat me I cannot divorce because I have no job."

Sukhi, 17, always wanted to be a dancer. Her British Sikh parents were so angry, they broke one of her legs with a hockey stick. "You wouldn’t believe a mother would do it to her child but she did." In a second letter she says "my leg is broken in so many places I can hardly walk".

Alibhai Brown tries to help but she is thwarted by parents who take the plea that she is meddling in their family affairs.  Sometimes she is able to make the social services remove a girl, who is being coerced, and place her in a safe home, but often the parents manage to recover the girl with the help of paid things. The girl is then packed off to India or Pakistan.

Who says time goes forward?