Last Wednesday at Wetherspoons with some of my friends, a friend took a phone call from someone they knew well.

During the phone call, while he was telling her of the main things reported in the Keighley News, she asked if there was anything else, and there was this amusing letter written by Anthony Silson, which claimed a person called Leo Robinson – that is I – was merely a figment of Tory central office's imagination! – Correspondent’s rude outbursts and vague claims (September 26).

She told the rest of us and so I took the call and he read out the letter to me over the phone. Later, I bought my Keighley News copy at a petrol station on the way home.

The only time I remember using the phrase ‘ideological left-wing clap-trap’ was in response to one of his letters. If I have used this phrase to another letter, then maybe you can remind our readers of this, Mr Silson. And I don’t really think of you as ‘other readers’, but rather a special treasure of the community, who has a particularly acute sense of nostalgia on the Britain of his youth. Those wonderful utopian post-war years, when Britain was united in its love of rationing and militant class struggles.
But then I stir from my thoughts, look around me, and realise we are in the second decade of the 21st century. And I look forward to telling readers about the hundreds of thousands of redundancies in public sector jobs that were so long overdue, and how most of them were not even providing front-line services but actually making more problems and obstacles to ordinary working people. So I wish the best for Anthony Silson, and many of his contemporaries who only recently have been adjusting to working and living within our collective means (oops, there goes another vague statement).
Leo Robinson
Skipton Road, Keighley