When I was half the age I am today, he was my favourite. There was not one Harold Robbins’s book that I did not read. The Carpetbeggars, The adventurers, A stone for Danny fisher – Harold wrote it, I read it.

My ‘relationship’ with Harold Robbins alas ended when i read the book ‘The lonely lady’. I did not like it when he wrote a phrase about Jesus Christ.

Still I had the right of choice. Regarding rights and choices, we have many. I can choose to watch a pornographic film on an Italian channel if I choose to; that is my right even though I prefer not to.

I can go on the internet and see something perverse if I want to although my preference usually amounts to anything Winston Churchill did or said. Here again, as an adult, it is my choice to read what I want on the net.

In a nutshell, as adults we have the right to choose. The producer of the play Stitching, Adrian Buckle, was right to go into a blinding rage over the censorship of the play on last Friday’s Xarabank.

I think the censorship board get up in a foul mood sometimes and decide who they are going to pick on and sadly this time it was the Adrian Nielsen play!

We can go on forever talking about freedom of expression but when it comes to practise it, it is a different story entirely. The freedom of expression I am writing about is not the freedom of staging this controversial play but the freedom of letting people choose whether they want to watch it or not.

If those allowed to see it are over 18, what in heaven’s sake is the problem? Haven’t we been allowed to read enough books about Myra Hindley and the moor murders to know enough what a kind-hearted lady dear Myra was? Haven’t we heard enough stories about abortion and the Roberta Gomperts woman with her Women on Waves ship trailing all over the world ready to get rid of unwanted babies to know what abortion is all about?

Don’t we hear enough blasphemous language in the street to realize how some people make it a part of their vocabulary?

What is the big deal about seeing all or some of this in a play?

People should be allowed to have the right to choose whether they want to see this kind of play or not. In my opinion, the board of censorship should be censored themselves for not giving audiences the right to choose.

VALERIE BORG

Valletta