The ICM survey (The Tory secret weapon? It is not Boris Johnson, 23 August) suggests the Conservatives would do worse under alternative leaders who are already known than under some anonymous person “who is quite young and able” and “not currently in government”. Didn’t this formula consign us to the premiership of David Cameron?
Francis Prideaux
London
• People in power promulgating strange definitions of fish goes back a long way (China decrees that trout is salmon, 15 August). In the 17th century the Catholic church declared beavers were fish so as not to jeopardise its mission among beaver-eating indigenous Canadians and make it permissible to eat the rodents during Lent.
Geoff Reid
Bradford
• Re removing pebbles from beaches (How to be an ethical beachcomber, G2 , 23 August), when the late poet late Ken Smith came with me to the Isle of Man, at each beach we visited he pocketed a pebble or two. He said it was to leave them at other people’s spaces to share their sense of place and poetic resonance.
Doug Sandle
Leeds
• Small children growing up in Barrow-in-Furness never had to buy footballs if they could wait for the November tides that deposited large numbers that had been swept out to sea from Blackpool and Morecambe in the summer.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
• Instead of scrapping 1p and 2p coins (Report, 23 August), would it not be simpler to issue 99p coins?
Paul Myners
House of Lords
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