Letters
Private inconvenience
Sir: Professor Wain in his article Parson's Displeasure' (16 October) offered a perfect paradigm of someone making a dutiful obeisance to change, whilst wishing that things could remain exactly as they are. I don't at all object to the idea of the old buf- fer bathing starkers in the Cherwell if he feels like it, but I do rather object to his wanting to barricade off a stretch of English river for the exclusive use of Oxford manhood. He probably never noticed it, but Parson's Pleasure used to be a bit of an inconvenience to 'ladies' boating on the river without a male protector to get the craft through the forbidden zone.
There are plenty of clubs in London where men like him and Richard West can go to get away from women (or indeed the 20th century generally), and who would wish to prevent them? Far be it from me to parrot the cry of 'Sexist Poseurs', or to im- pugn the unselfconscious purity of those nude Victorian males splashing happily in Parson's Pleasure in the days when everyone was born by binary fission. It's just that I consider the English countryside to be as much my heritage as theirs.
D. A. Roberts
20 Lovell Road, Rough Common, Canterbury
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