Sir, - Do you have any idea of the hu hea, ri ra, and ruille buille that arose from your publication of my letter on women drivers (October 8th)? Such hurly burly! What a hullabaloo! My home was assailed by telephone callers from several radio stations, national, local and obscure. I don't know if you would be gratified to know the strange quarters in which you are read.
Although I was abroad on that day, one local station perseveredsufficiently to interview me on the following day, apparently with a view to stirring up intersexual hostilities, or, failing that, to sow the seeds of war between different classes of road-user - unconscionably reckless in the present fraught state of our traffic.
But the wildest hue and cry was raised by the radio-show researcher of the very doyen of our national airwaves. What agitated her (and, perhaps him) was that she (or he) did not know the meaning of one of the words in my letter and was unable to find it despite looking in "a very large dictionary". Nothing would do her but to telephone me there and then to solve the mystery. Fortunately, as it turned out, I had overlooked leaving a forwarding telephone number. I can't imagine what my French host or Spanish chairman would have made of it if the weighty business of our meeting had been interrupted by the importuning of a radio station in search of the meaning of one little word.
Surely, in the undoubtedly chequered history of your letters page, nothing has given rise to such commotion, agitation, fuss, clamour, racket, or hubbub? If there's a better word for it than "charivari", I'm a Dutchman. - Yours, etc.
Frank Farrell,
Lakelands Close,
Stillorgan,