OH NO, KKE. Your tradition and history are noble and some of what you have done has warmed the cockles of my heart in the last few years.

But your communique on the recent article about Syriza in this paper really did sounded like a steaming old pile of sectarian Stalinist bollocks.

It reminded me of my first ever encounter with the organised radical left.

During the short and victorious miners’ strike of 1972 — during which there was a three-day week and power cuts which some readers will be old enough to remember — I was sure their cause was right.

Hearing that pompous git Ted Heath and his upper-class cronies whining about the miners “holding the country to ransom” made me very angry.

I knew that miners were people who did a very dangerous job, earned low pay and produced the fuel which was the cornerstone of our daily lives. Given that my mum and I had very little money, just her widow’s pension, I was naturally on the side of the underdog in any case.

Just under the age of 15, I resolved to make my first radical contacts and, wandering down Gloucester Road in Brighton one day in my school holidays, I came across something that proclaimed itself in large letters to be The Brighton Workers’ Bookstore.

I went inside and, sure enough, there were loads of books. Books by Karl Marx (I’d heard of him) Lenin (him too) Stalin (him too but wasn’t he supposed to be a bit nasty?) Mao (ah, the Little Red Book, I knew about that) and some bloke called Enver Hoxha (who?). A large pamphlet proudly proclaimed: Albania — The Only Socialist Country In Europe!

I’d never heard of Albania and certainly wasn’t aware that it was in Europe. I knew a song called The Misty Coast of Albany by Tyrannosaurus Rex but given Marc Bolan’s hippy-bollocks lyrical bent I doubted very much that there was any likelihood of a connection with revolutionary Marxism.

Characteristically, even at that early age, I took the bull by the horns. “Where’s Albania?” I asked the bloke in charge. “And why is it the only socialist country in Europe? What about Russia and places like that?”

When I walked into that shop I had never heard the word “revisionist” before. By the time I left, some two hours later, I had heard it many, many times. More times than I would ever have believed possible.

I now knew that Albania stood alone as a beacon of socialism in Europe and that it was allied to the People’s Republic of China, even if I still didn’t know where it was.

And I knew that the Soviet Union and its allies were revisionists. I had, if I am honest, still very little idea what “revisionist” meant. But I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to be.

I went home and got out a map. Soon I knew exactly where Albania was. I started to read about comrade Enver Hoxha (pictured), how he led the Albanian communist partisans to victory against the nazis and about his battles with the Yugoslav revisionist plotters — if you were a revisionist you were always a plotter, it went with the territory.

I started listening to Radio Tirana.

And I began to understand the importance of efficient tractor production, something that really hadn’t occurred to me before.