People in Oxford are tremendous writers of letters to newspapers, a fact that readers of The Oxford Times have weekly cause to celebrate. I celebrate, too, despite the brickbats I regularly receive. It is always better to be criticised than ignored.

In the national media, correspondents from Oxford figure far more prominently on the letters pages than might be expected for a city of such modest size. Last Saturday in The Times, for instance, three of the 13 letters printed came from here.

One was from a friend of mine, John Thompson, the retired landscape architect of Oxford City Council, regretting the lack of design skills these days among planning officers. “The result,” he concluded, “is that new developments detract from the setting and fail to connect with existing buildings.”

Connection of a quite different sort was the subject of a letter in last week’s Spectator from Benedict King, of Oxford. Since this is a family newspaper, and Gray Matter among the most family-friendly parts of it, I shall have to be very careful in the words I use to describe what he was saying.

First, a little background. Back in early August, the distinguished journalist Peregrine Worsthorne wrote a sharply-worded paragraph in his Speccie Diary concerning Philip Hensher’s novel King of the Badgers. Sir Perry found the upfront (though that is hardly the mot juste) gay sex content repellent to him. He concluded: “At a time when we are trying to accept homosexuality as ordinary and even cosy, such efforts to stuff filth up our noses are in danger of awakening prejudices that we hoped had been put to sleep for ever.”

A week later Hensher struck back, with deadly fire, in the magazine’s letters column. He apologised for having shocked Worsthorne, then took him to task for shifting the location of his book’s gay orgy from a property in Devon to Cornwall, and misidentifying its owners as two antique dealers.

He wrote: “I know that gay men in novels invariably are antique dealers, but it was one of the novel’s quotidian comic effects that this pair are a lawyer and a cheesemonger [no laughing at the back!]. Indeed, one of my gay characters so far forgets himself as actually to open a garage and mend cars for a living.”

There matters might have ended — except that the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson decided to prolong the debate by offering both participants a whole page to expand their arguments.

Curiously, Sir Perry chose to occupy a significant chunk of his with a detailed description — eye-opening in the extreme, with too much detail for me — of his own involvement as a young man with the love that dared not speak its name (then at least).

It was to this article that Mr King alluded last week in his letter. “What’s the difference?” was its heading, the point being that the writer could see no difference between the activities involved in a practice I shall call ‘x’ and another that had better be ‘y’.

“Does Mr Worsthorne understand a distinction between these activities,” Mr King asked, “or was he just using two words instead of one because he loves the noise they make?”

Now I feel pretty confident that Sir Peregrine will spring to his own defence in the magazine published today.But in case he does not, I shall merely direct Mr King towards a good dictionary (Collins, for instance) where he will find quite clearly what the difference is.

My readers, I feel sure, will presumably already have noted the “Mr Worsthorne” applied to a gentleman who was knighted fully 20 years ago.

Before reaching the letters page of the Speccie last week, I had been chuckling over the Diary, written on this occasion by the historian Andrew Roberts. As a piece of shameless name-dropping it could hardly be bettered (even in Craig Brown’s best parody style), with Carly Simon entertaining our scribe and other guests at a joint birthday party at Martha’s Vineyard for Bill Clinton and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. “We drank mojitos, ate burgers and grits.”

What no Kentucky Fried Chicken, I asked myself, remembering that Roberts’s family fortune was built on flogging this greasy, finger-lickin’ product, developed by the estimable Colonel Sanders?

In an interview a couple of years ago in the Evening Standard, Roberts owned to putting on a stone and a half during his Cambridge student days as a consequence of having a ‘free-pass’ to KFC outlets.

Another question struck me as I read the books pages. In William Leith’s review of Alexander Masters’s The Genius in the Basement, he wrote of its subject Simon Norton: “He is trying to understand symmetry — the concept, in maths, that, when one thing happens, another thing will always happen.”

Are not two of the commas here — indeed probably all four — superfluous?

As it happens I had moments before been reading Tony Augarde on the use of punctuation to clarify meaning — on the letters page of The Oxford Times.