Circa 1976 in a bookshop in the city of Mosul, modern Iraq, where Jonah in the ancient city of Nineveh, Mesopotamia, just across the River Tigris, once dwelt, I bought a book written in Arabic on Samuel Beckett containing, among other things, a photo-copy of a post card from Samuel Beckett to Suhail Bedee Bishruie, then American University in Beirut, Lebanon Professor of English Literature, and currently a Maryland University Professor next door to you. Bishruie and his colleagues planned a birthday party for SB and wrote him a request to do so. In a reply characteristic of him, Beckett wrote to Beshruie to the effect of "I kneel to you to excuse me from this." Lois, get hold of Bishruie in Maryland to get from him that SB post card to include it in your collection of the correspondence of SB. Rush to Bishruie as, according to word I have heard, he was seen walking on two crutches on the Maryland beach due to old age. My MA supervisor in my thesis on SB's plays, Leeds University, UK in 1971, Robert Welch currently Dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Ulster-Coleraine, N Ireland, editor of Oxford Companion to Irish Literature and father-in-law of the actor who played Lucky in Sir Peter Hall's August 2005 production of Waiting for Godot, told me during my visit to him in July 2005 that Bishruie had visited him a couple of weeks ago, and that they agreed to co-author a book on Irish literature