Funny, Miss Loh, I thought it was all in good humour

THERE was I, just hopped off my Harley, with dust on my face and still in my leathers, the phone rang and it was the South China Morning Post asking what it takes to be a China adviser, saying in effect that skin colour didn't matter or mean all that much in their selection. Different Chinese had different levels of feeling about being Chinese anyway. For example I said, Christine Loh was probably - just probably, mark you - less Chinese than Sir David Akers-Jones.

It was a jokey little paradox - an attention grabber, if you like, to drive home the point that Hongkong is a unique collection of attitudes and sentiments.

But loh! if I may use that expression - Miss Christine Loh thunders into print, opposite your editorials on April 7, accusing me of racial chauvinism, personal rudeness and intellectual vulgarity. Well, rudeness was the furthest thing from my mind, I wasnot even trying to be intellectual.

When it comes to racial chauvinism, Miss Loh seems to be suffering from a dose of it. I think she was simply miffed at being thought less Chinese than anyone else - especially Sir David Akers-Jones. She declared that ''my approach required no further comment'' - which would have been fine by me - and then she launched into a breathless lecture of politically correct fervour accusing me of arguments that conservatism was a ''Chinese value'' and that liberalism was ''less Chinese'' and a ''surrender to Westerners''.

She peaked that lot with ''ideas have no race. They belong to humanity''. The intellectual vacuum contained by that notion and the rest of the diatribe, all worked out of my one light-hearted comparison, have prompted one or two reflections of my own on Miss Loh's position or rather lack of it.

The criterion ''Is it Chinese?'' and ''Does it work for Hongkong'', are not mutually exclusive as she suggested.