This  won't reflect well on me, but I have to say yesterday's FT reminded me of Viz, the comic for thrity-somethings suffering from arrested development.

One of its many satirical innovations (Viz's that is, not the FT's) was to run letters from readers looking for a fight. The next letter would be a response from another reader, up for a fight and keen to arrange a time and a place.

It was all very childish, though no less amusing for it. And it captured perfectly the false arguments dressed up as serious debate that fills so many letters pages on the nationals. What was new with this approach was the way in which time ceased to matter. Why wait for the next issue when readers could respond instantly.

Now the FT is at it, with its report on yesterday's Oxera report from the DTI and the Financial Reporting Council. The news was broken on page one and in the same edition there was a letter on page 16 responding.

Full marks to BDO's Jeremy Newman and Grant Thornton's Michael Cleary for speed of thought.

Many of us had embargoed copies os the report but Newman and Cleary were impressively quick to react.

More significantly perhaps, they presented an intriguingly united front. Could the mid-tier mergers denounced as unlikely by the FT's leader piece in the same edition not be as far-fetched as some might expect? Perhaps not on this admittedly scant evidence.