The market puts a stop to the cowboys

Les J Curtis (DW 6 January, letter headlined: Qualifications are the best weed killer) must, unwittingly, number himself among those with skull-revolving inferiority complexes and an innate inability to ride above the ruck.

My initials are all in front of my name and 2i recently came second in a national design competition [that of designing a hoarding for British Land’s Corn Exchange site in the City of London].

Cowboys by definition – muddy footwear, stubby 5B pencils, Mesozoic English, the imagination of pre-Columbian traffic wardens, the concept of a font as something used in the service of baptism, the incapability of arriving on site on time on song, and so on – do not survive. They implode, they self-destruct. Kersquish!

A pitch is a promise to deliver. There are no second bites at these cherries.

Mr Curtis need have no fear; why does he, one wonders, exercise himself so flappingly?

It is nothing, necessarily, to do with qualifications. The weed killers, in no particular order, are:

*Talent

*Professionalism

*Intelligence

*Energy.

Cowboy fertilisers are:

Beer on the breath

No spare wheel

Back-of-the-envelope elevations

The tendency to expectorate without averting the head – much.

The market decides who survives. I am sure it will agree that Mr Curtis should, and we wish him well.

Jonathan M Nokes

Ripley

Surrey