Enough
Sir: Or perhaps it should be Ola! since you have chosen to print a rather redundant, slow-in-the-uptake tailwag postscript (Letters, 16 June) from the similarly describable Caballero Courtauld de la Triste Figura who, as he reminded you, so long tagged and trotted behind your predecessor as his Sancho Panza. The povre viejo Wok, in his still foreign Field evidently nostalgic for dear dead siesta times and Spanish tuition in the Calle Doughty, is quite wrong in supposing that your gratifying commendation of my original letter had ever been in any sense private. You yourself, sir, know all too well that it emanated from the editorial chair as you excogitated your Nihil Obstat to my only very partially stern rebuke.
Furthermore I have never had occasion to bandy private matters in correspondence with you, having only met you very briefly on the single afternoon you were good enough to wait upon me with a proffered (and accepted) apology.
Alexander Chancellor is in very different case, being an old acquaintance I long mistook for a friend. The sad-coun- tenanced, bullfighting fan editor of the Field is obviously not aware of the very strong views you have expressed to me and others on the subject, or he would have known that you would never have printed anything that you believed to be or wished to keep confidential, even in order to set a testing trap for me.
However, let us now with profit recall the favourite cracker-motto of one of your heroes, the great Lord Balfour: 'Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all.'
Like so many other of your readers, I am impatient to read after my signature the words 'That's enough Forbes for now. Ed.'
Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
That's enough, Forbes. Ed.
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