My daughter and I were keen to see Romeo et Juliette until we discovered that the price for a seat in the back of the gods was pounds 50. Until seat prices are affordable, Covent Garden will never be "the people's opera" DIANE STURCH Northwood, Middlesex. Last week, though, he posted a statement on the official Stephen King website contending that the media had taken some of his comments to Couric out of context. "My endurance is much less than it was, and my output has been cut in half, but I am working," he insisted.If so, how long will it be before Bullet, Smith, the van, the sledgehammer and his lap skewed sideways make it into a best-seller? "Sooner or later," he told Couric, "everything goes in.".

Jenness contends that that act of generosity alone will bias the jury in the writer's favour. He is also trying to have the trial heard in a state outside Maine, where feelings about King are less passionate. District Attorney Joseph O'Connor ridicules this, pointing out that King is famous everywhere. "Realistically, where will you change the venue to?" he asks. "Timbuktu?"What of Mr King's writing, meanwhile? Ten days ago fans had a fright, when the author gave his first televised interview since his accident.

Talking to Katie Couric of the Today show on NBC, he revealed that when he tried to resume work after the summer he found himself almost totally blocked "It was as if I'd never done this in my life. It was like starting over from square one." He even intimated that he might never complete a new work again. Some letter-writers suggest that if it had been King at the wheel and Smith had been the victim, no charges would ever have been brought. Prosecutors in Bangor insist that the trial will be unaffected by the identity of the man run down.Mr Smith's lawyer, John Jenness, is unconvinced. He notes that following his treatment at two Maine hospitals, Mr King made donations to them amounting to $200,000. But their relative isolation makes them wary of anything that smacks of the big city. Nobody, not even King, should be allowed to trample the small guy."The pendulum has definitely swung back against Mr King and for Mr Smith," Dick Shaw, the paper's editorial page assistant, confirmed yesterday.

"At first, most of the letters were quite sympathetic to King, but after a while people began to think that King's celebrity was having an unfair bearing on how justice would come out."The love that Maine people feel for King may become eclipsed by their natural instinct to back the underdog. At first, sympathy in Maine was with the Kings, who are virtual patron saints of the state But recently emotions have begun to turn. Letters to the Bangor News have been running about four-to-one behind Smith.That the people of Bangor should be voicing sympathy with Smith, rather than King, seems surprising. It is not that in Maine, where fish and trees traditionally provided most people's income before the growth of tourism, people are especially fickle.