A READER recently wrote of an encounter with pint-sized soccer hooligans disguised in school uniforms.

I too have had the experience of meeting up with soccer hooligans, similarly disguised. However, these were much larger - six feet tall.

These hominids spat upon me for no reason whatever. As I am myself five feet tall and 81 years of age, in indifferent health, I refrained from retaliating. I did not wish to be flattened and used as a football, which would surely have been my fate.

Furthermore, had I survived I would probably have been jailed for life for "resisting a minor," while my transgressors would have been rewarded with an extended holiday in Morocco. Such are the vagaries of British so-called justice these days.

Mind you, I would probably have met up with some interesting fellow lifers in Dartmoor or wherever - such as farmers who had endeavoured to defend their properties from persistent attack by marauders and head-teachers who had tried, in vain, to defend their persons from ferocious pupils.

I suppose do-gooders would suggest that I should have appealed to these thugs' better natures. Of course they do not have "better natures." What nonsense to think that they do.

D E MARGRETT,

Worcester.