Time we all put respect on menu

ON holiday in Turkey our small group stopped for a cuppa in an English-owned cafe/bar. Reading the menu there was this following insertion: “Please remember you are in a secular Muslim country and as such you should respect their law, customs and way of life.”

I can’t find fault with a word of it but the owner stated that he was “persuaded” to include it.

The point that I wish to raise is what would be the reaction in Britain if all ethnic bars/restaurants had to include a similar text based on being in a Christian country.

Dissent would be likely and followed by intervention by 
 the EU.

Surely our differences make us unique and each country’s citizens should mutually respect each other when in others’ homeland?

Flaw in attack on use of floor

From: Maxwell Laurie, Victoria Terrace, Cockfield, County Durham.

OH dear, Mrs Barnard takes a rather narrow, even snobbish, view of some English usages in her letter (Yorkshire Post, October 8).

Modernity is all very well but dialect is surely admissible – 
even if old fashioned. And 
my trusty Shorter Oxford Dictionary states that: “floor” may equal “ground”.

Dialectical Middle English perhaps, but clearly Mrs Barnard has laid her lawns and flowerbeds on the floor of her garden.

I support, however, her contention that rivers either overflow or breach embankments but do not burst their banks.