POKING fun, snide or just plain ignorant? I refer to your account of the Christian rally Backing Cliff at Boston Spa (October 2). Rebecca Gilbert joined them, you declare. Did she? Your reporter and photographer arrived at the lunch break, missing the opening session by singing group Trinity and testimony from their 17-year-old soloist.

Your reporter disappeared before the rest of the meeting began. She thus missed Christine Bannan's touching story of how she became a fan and why, and my analysis of The Lord's Prayer, clause by clause. Cliff's capacity and potential to be a prophet was set in that context.

Your reporter declined to peruse the text of my talk before it was given, took reactions to it before it was given and was gone before it was delivered.

Perhaps (a favourite cop-out word in your report) she felt unequal to the task - after all, when I mentioned Billy Graham to her she asked who he was... She had never heard of him.

Her assumption about a small group of pensioners nibbling sandwiches "apparently oblivious to the fact that Armageddon could be on its way" is way out. Her disdainful view of old people who have studied Armageddon twice as long as she has lived, ill becomes your paper. These are people who suffered the aftermath of the First World War and endured and served in the second. Get a life, girl.

Iain McGregor,

Baileyfield Road,

Edinburgh.