THE number of asylum seekers in my surgeries has dropped significantly in recent months. I think, and hope, that this reflects a reduction in overall numbers in town.

But anxiety, and in some cases anger, about asylum seekers is still around: as I saw and heard the other Saturday morning when I was doing one of my regular open air question-and-answer sessions outside Marks and Spencer on King William Street.

The complaint on Saturday morning was that we were not sending back asylum seekers quickly enough. I understand the frustration but the best answer I could give was to tell my audience about an asylum case I had had on the Friday evening.

Then, two long-standing, church-going residents of town came to the surgery with an asylum seeker to try to persuade me of the merit of his case. He came from Eritrea in the Horn of Africa where there has been long-standing ethnic conflict.

I went through all the papers, explaining that his appeal had already been looked at in detail but had been turned down. He therefore had reached the end of the road, and had to go back to his country of origin.

The ladies who saw me were uncomprehending about my approach -- wasn't it obvious that the young man concerned was very upset about the likelihood of going back; did he not appear completely genuine? Both points were accurate but I also had to explain that his case had had to be judged objectively against the international yardstick "well-founded fear of persecution".

My answer on the Saturday morning was that whilst people objected in general to asylum seekers, they had a different approach when faced with the individual facts and we had to secure a balance there.

What is it about world leaders and dinosaurs?

There are plenty of places to hold big bashes here in New York but the United States Government chose the New York Natural History Museum for the venue for the annual reception hosted by the American President for Heads of Government and Foreign Ministers attending the United Nations General Assembly.

So there we all were making polite conversation amongst the skeletons of these huge animals, and not very funny jokes about who the dinosaurs represented.

It was my friend the Russian Foreign Minister's birthday, so he was in particularly jocular form.

Last Thursday evening instead of coming up to Blackburn, I had to go to Stockholm for the memorial service for Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minister who had been so brutally murdered seven days before.

She was a close friend, and her death all the more shocking because she was relatively young and left two children of school age.

After the service I got the British plane to drop me off at the British Aerospace airfield at Wharton so that I could pick up on my constituency surgeries.