Student stirs
Sir: May I be allowed the right of reply to such parts of Mr Kirkaldy's letter (30 May) as are comprehensible? I ask because it is as blatant a piece of question-begging as I have ever read in your columns. 'Outdated argument', for example. What on earth has the date of an argument to do with its accuracy? I am right, he is wrong, and that my opinion was in vogue before his is of no relevance at all.
. . antiquity . . . reality demands some- thing else. The antique is real—often a lot more real than the modern—and has an equal or greater right to have its demands heard. Participation is here to stay, whether we like it or not.' Of course it isn't. If I don't like it, and a sufficient number of other people don't like it, then it will go, like Concorde, motorways, Stansted airport, the multi-racial society, and everything else that has come 'to stay, whether we like it or not'.
`The militants' answer is unacceptable.' Certainly. And since every concession strengthens their demands for the next step (see Mr Wigg's letter [16 May] that prompted my own), let us make no conces- sions, or we put too much at risk—not just my drinking and idleness, important as they are. That was the point of my letter.
Two minor matters: 'appall:ng puns'— only one actually, but I apologise for it, and 'American tourists'—let me assure Mr Kirkaldy that nothing would cause me greater pleasure than to hold a machine gun massacre of them all in Tom Quad. As they are, they make 'the antique and antiquity' of Oxford a whole gee-is-this-Oxford- College-Wilbur lot less attractive.
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