Re: your clients, Lech Kaczynski / Mirek Tololànek my blog post, 3.vi.09

Dear Mr Faversham,

  Thank you for your further correspondence regarding my blog post today. It really is remarkable how the digital age makes things so immediate.

  You are, of course, quite correct. It was wrong of me, entirely wrong, to suggest that either of your clients is mad. I have no evidence to support such a claim, even if – which I understand is denied – such were to exist. I accept entirely that I was wrong to write such a thing, and I deeply regret the decision. 

  You and your clients will, I hope, appreciate that I am for the most part a light-hearted writer, given to satire. My recent novel, The Gone-Away World, features sections in which Cuba joins the United Kingdom and the authorities of an unnamed nation take precautions against attacks by suicide shrews. I am not the most serious person, and this unfortunate tendency to hyperbole and low humour got the better of me on this occasion. I absolutely accept that Mr Kaczynski is as sane as the next man, and the next man, of course, is Mr Topolànek, who is as sane as the next man in the other direction.

  I hope it will go some way to ameliorating the situation if I explain that I was, by my own lights, being kind to your clients. To me, as a weak, immoral person with few virtues and many vices, towering pillars of virtue like your clients are incomprehensible. I mistrust people who describe homosexuality as a ‘pathology’, for example. I am too ethically blind to see the reasoning behind Mr Kaczynski’s support for the death penalty, and when Mr Topolànek refers to Global Warming as a ‘pseudo-crisis’, I’m afraid my anti-liberal soul, filled with the fear that I will lose out of the great beanfeast of subsidies heaped upon the Green Industry, curdles and rebels. Yes, I am stepped in sin. I know it, and my readers now know it to. It feels good to have cleared the air.

  The point is that, because these ideas are so far from my own – along with so many others which your clients espouse – I called them ‘loons’ – which is, after all, a friendly way to disagree with someone, colloquially – rather than referring to them as ‘homophobic monsters’ or what have you. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I now deeply regret this decision and will hasten to make the offending passages more accurate.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Nick Harkaway