SIR - Rupert Pitt (Chronicle letters, June 28) really should read other people's letters before he criticises them for things they don't do, don't think and have never said or even hinted at.

In his version, my letter (June 14) on central parking said that I "cannot walk" into central Winchester, "as he (myself) lives at Northlands Drive, and therefore should use a car".

In fact, it said the opposite. Christopher Gillham, I wrote, can walk to anywhere he wants in the centre in five minutes, "I can do it in 10 or 15. Not many of those who use central Winchester are so lucky..."

My plea was for not for myself but those who do need central parking, such as mothers forced, without it, to hang around in the cold and wet to hoik kids, shopping bags and pushchair onto buses.

Two readers have replied to that. What on earth am I on about? asks Jenny Stables (June 21), implying that such people should all be as hardy as, commendably, she is.

Even hardier, Frank Williams (June 28), thinks it "patronising" to suggest that they aren't.

Maybe this hardy pair should ask around a bus queue on a dank November afternoon. They might find that what I'm on about is the real world.

Unwittingly, they both exemplify what I urged on Mr Gillham: that it's easy to preach virtue when you've no need to practise vice, and that lucky folk like him (or me, or them) should give more thought to those less lucky. But at least they took up my point.

Mr Pitt is too busy about cars and climate-change even to notice it.

Still I thank him for his "sympathy" with me over the expense of bus travel. Not, happily (see above), that I need it - nor ever mentioned that topic either.

Stephen Hugh-Jones, Northlands Drive, Winchester.