That's what I call real editing

"That's what I call real editing."I believe he kept the letter framed in his lavatory - certainly it was read out by one of the actors in every performance of the play, and I calculated that if I had got 2p royalty every time it was used, I might now be the proud owner of a lot of 2p pieces.How The Spectator will replace Jeff's "Low Life" I do not know. Whatever else I put in this anthology, there will be nothing funnier or better written.)One of my few claims to fame is that I had a letter read out in full in the play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. When I was literary editor of Punch I commissioned a book review from him, which he left unwritten for so long that I finally wrote to him, saying: "Dear Jeffrey, Are you going to write the f*****g article or aren't you?" ( No asterisks in the letter, of course.) The next day he appeared with the article in hand "Good letter, Miles," he said. When you get to the stage where they tried to handicap the fastest cat by taping kitchen weights to its stomach, you should be rolling around with laughter. But one of his friends rigged up a course for cat-racing in a long corridor in his flat, and invited Jeffrey and a few others round to place bets on which of several half-starved cats would run (and jump) from one end of the corridor to the saucers of cat meat at the other.

I have been going through old volumes of Punch searching for material for an anthology, and I have come across a piece he wrote on cat-racing which I think is one of the funniest pieces ever written.(Cat racing? Well, Jeffrey liked to back the horses, so l963 was a bad year for him. The winter was so hard that all horse-racing was off for months Nothing to bet on. As he got older and more immobile his writing became grouchier, as some humorous writers tend to do, but at least he was grumbling about the here and now and not looking back resentfully to a golden youth, and he grumbled with great style.In earlier days, though, when he was just a young soak, he was not an old grouch. What a bad time to choose to die, when so many more famous people were taking the headlines. Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Sir Georg Solti - all titled, oddly enough - and then a long way down the fame stakes, jostling for media coverage, poor old Jeffrey Bernard, whose passing may well have gone unnoticed by many people.Many people, of course, won't even know who he is, will not have read his weekly "Low Life" column in The Spectator (to counter-balance the "High Life" column of Taki), and thus will not have met one of the most graceful and funny writers of the back-end of the century. "Having Charlie Chaplin on board? It means that if this plane crashes and the newspaper headlines say `Famous Funny Man Dead', it won't be me or you they're talking about."I thought of this melancholy but funny remark when I heard of the death of Jeffrey Bernard. It was a strange thought to be so close to one of the most famous men in the world, a man whose silent image is still to this day better known than that of most people alive and well."You know what this means?" said Geoff.

Before take-off, Geoffrey nudged me violently and pointed to a tall, grey-haired man disappearing into the section with bigger seats and freer drinks. "Did you see who that was?" he hissed. "No," I said, "never seen him before in my life.""Yes you have," he said. "It was Charlie Chaplin."And so it was, Charlie Chaplin going home to Switzerland. About 20 years ago I was on a plane going from London to Zurich and found myself sitting next to Geoffrey Dickinson, the cartoonist and assistant art editor of Punch This was no coincidence; we were travelling together.

Sir: So Ravel's Bolero indicates that the composer "was in the early stages of dementia", because its "most striking feature" is the persistent rhythm ("Bolero: the work of a man going mad", 4 September)? No, Dr Eva Cybulska, that's what the music is about. Composers aren't laboratory rats: they make up music as a voluntary act of will, and sometimes the act of will involves deciding to illustrate the idea of persistence. Oh, and by the way: the "evolution of the theme" that your niece is looking for is there, under and around the persistent rhythm. That's how you can tell the music is by a real composer, not a minimalist wannabe.On this showing, was every Baroque composer who wrote music on a repeating bass line also showing incipient dementia? (How about Pachelbel, with that perennial Canon?) A couple of years after Bolero Ravel managed to overcome his disability to toss off a couple of magnificent piano concertos - not a "throbbing rhythm" in a carload.ERIC VAN TASSELFowlmere, Cambridgeshire. To help customers, and in response to demand, BT now recommends the 10 numbers which they have recently called which would give the biggest savings. Of course, calling patterns change and, over time, some of those numbers may be called less frequently or not at all.BT include everyone's home number as an 11th Friends & Family number so that those customers who telephone home, using their BT Chargecard, can benefit from the 10 per cent discount.IAN DREWBT Market Response ManagerHemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire.