Sir: I too, like Mr D.P. Dick (Letters, 11 January),
have wondered who Alastair Forbes is and why he figures so frequently in your pages. I have concluded that he is an old British expat, fled these many years to Swiss mountain air, probably because he can no longer countenance the peculiar ways of contemporary Britain.
His idiosyncratic English style, so scat- tered with the personal pronoun which may or may not indicate egotism, and so discur- sive that sentences seem to go on forever with very little interrelation between subor- dinate clauses, suggest that long absence or advanced age may have loosened his grip on what I assume is his mother tongue. However, I may be wrong. Could he be a Francophone Anglophile Swiss, possibly of Scottish descent, who is more accustomed to the long rhythmic cadences of Marcel Proust and equally self-centred? Whatever the truth may be, you are right to reverence and indulge the aged.
Michael Ware
64 Cranley Gardens, London N10
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