Letter to the editor: I read with interest your perceiv-ed experience of racism (5 tho-ughts of the week, November 26).

It drew my particular attention because it rather reminded me of a story my nephew – a bar tender – told me a couple of weeks ago that bares an astonishing resemblance to the situation you wrote of.

The black guy in question had waited and waited at the bar and not got served – even when he was the only one standing there. He had gone back to sit down and approached the bar again when he saw a white man being served. He asked exactly the same question of the barmaid as the guy in your story.

However, unlike you, the white guy being served did not see it as racism against him, he asked the barmaid if it was true and to serve the black guy, but she would not.

My nephew, who intervened because of the barmaid’s refusal, asked her later if it was true and she said she did not want to serve him because she did not like that “kind of colour of skin”. The next evening the manager was serving and saw her behaving in exactly the same way to every non-white person who came to her area of the bar to be served.

She lasted three days there and was asked not to come back.

It is good that the white guy in question there did not see it, incorrectly, as racism against himself and then go and publish it in a local paper.

That would have been completely one-sided, factually incorrect and a bit paranoid of him, would it not?

CLEMENT STOCKE-BRIDGES, Orpington