INFORMATION, what a lot of it there is about. I'd tell you some but you would only forget. Much like I do. Our lives sit on a mattress of facts afloat on a sea of statistics and we can't recall any of it. So with all this info available, why do we need any more?

Someone once said that information is power, or something.

The quotations book was no help. This is because someone didn't say that at all.

Turns out that the actual quotation, a proverb from the late 16th century, is: "Knowledge is power."

Knowledge, information - what's the difference? Not much perhaps, except that information can't become knowledge until you know about it.

And there's an awful lot we don't know because we haven't been told or we are not allowed to ask.

It was reported this week that Tony Blair has succeeded in delaying the Freedom of Information Act from being put into effect possibly until as late as January 2005.

As this would be more than four years after Parliament approved the Act, a new name might be more appropriate.

Perhaps this measure could be re-christened the Freedom To Know Not Very Much In A Few Years Act.

Mr Blair may be worried about all this information ending up in the wrong hands. If so, he has a point. It wouldn't do for people to go around actually knowing what the Government is up to. Back in the mists of some time long ago, in a distant age before he became prime minister, Tony Blair declared that a Freedom Of Information Act was "absolutely fundamental".

So fundamental, indeed, that now it might as well be known as the What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You Act.

The argument about when the Freedom Of Information Act should be implemented spins round whether the Act should be phased in during the next three years, or introduced in a "big bang" in 2004 (or quite possibly 2044, for all I know).

Mr Blair apparently favours the BB approach because this would give the government departments, local councils, schools, hospitals and so forth involved time to prepare for openness. Or possibly because after a big bang there will be so much smoke no one will be able to see a thing.

Now this sounds like a fine piece of evasive double-thinking. It was "absolutely fundamental" for freedom of information to be introduced in 1996, and yet now, five years on, this measure is so vital it can be shunted off into the untouchable future.

At this point I will admit that some of the information we should be free to know will be dreadfully dull - the most deadly stuff, buried away in Government reports or stored in old boxes in the dusty bowels of local councils. But just because it's dull doesn't mean this information is not important.

Often this very dullness is a sort of defence barrier, put there in the hope that seekers after the truth will soon be yawning and heading for the nearest pub instead.

Strangely enough, the reports that Tony Blair is keen on delaying free information came on the same day that he went on the defensive over the bombing of Afghanistan.

Perhaps it was just a personal reaction, but I thought it was offensive to be told in such strongly emotional terms that we should never forget what happened in New York and Washington.

Most of us don't need reminding because we won't ever forget.

But that doesn't deny our perfect right to question the sense of continued bombing - a campaign about which there should be as much free information as possible.