We should indeed “be shocked into action by the fact that wealth, class and geography still dictate life expectancy” (Paul Mason, G2, 1 December). Healthy life expectancy, as he reports, is 16 years less in Blackpool than it is a three-hour drive away in Wokingham. It’s a 12-minute drive from where I live in Newcastle to the council ward I represent, where life expectancy is 12 years less and which is served by the largest food bank in the country.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• Peter Clement (Letters, 27 November), has missed Robert Frost’s irony – Mending Wall satirises the neighbour’s “Good fences make good neighbours” refrain. The narrator speaks against unthinking isolationism: “Why do they make good neighbours? ... Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out”. Born in San Francisco to a Scottish immigrant mother, Frost was himself a migrant to the UK in 1912-15 before returning to the US.
Dr Huw Davies
Swansea
• I don’t get Jess Cartner-Morley (Wearing shades in December used to scream ‘show-off’. But now they’re actually quite fashionable, 1 December). Wearing sunglasses in winter was, she says, a sign of “wankerdom”, but now it’s OK because it’s à la mode. Doesn’t she just mean that more people have become dedicated followers of Onan?
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany
• Re early-flowering forsythia and snowdrops (Letters, 28 and 30 November). I am bemused and delighted that a cream-coloured primrose growing up through the pebbles in our drive hasn’t stopped flowering for over 18 months. A photo of it appeared in our local newspaper last December. How much climate change does this signify?
Betty Clarke
Malvern, Worcestershire
• The mimosa tree in our garden is coming in to flower – to welcome delegates to the Paris climate conference?
Colin Perchard
St Martin, Jersey
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