Sir, – I enjoyed Margaret Hickey's atmospheric recollections of Woodstock (Irishwoman's Diary, August 12th), an impressively lucid rebuttal to the theory that "if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't really there".
Dave Robbie (Letters, August 17th) is less reliable, citing "Dublin v Kerry in the football, Kilkenny v Tipperary in the hurling", and "an arrogant upper-class moron as British prime minister", to suggest a person awakening from a 50-year coma might conclude he had been asleep for only a matter of hours.
The sporting memories are half-right; the 1969 football final was fought out by Kerry and Offaly, the hurling final by Kilkenny and Cork. However, the Labour prime minister of the day was a thoroughly down-to-earth, Yorkshire-accented, raincoat-wearing, pipe-smoking, HP sauce-loving, Huddersfield Town-supporting grammar-school boy who got a first-class degree at Oxford.
Mr Robbie has a point though. A coma victim of Harold Wilson’s 1969 Britain might think he had stepped into a nightmare if awakening to the world of Boris Johnson. – Yours, etc,
ALAN SWEETMAN,
Dublin 12.