Readers may not know that they can buy new clothes and trainers/boots online via Amazon’s Calais wish list for the people living in squalor and misery in the Jungle at Calais. Providing the items you list (We are humans not animals, G2, 4 November) is not an insurmountable task. I have just made a large bulk purchase of men’s waterproof trousers which Amazon informs me will be delivered by Monday next at the latest. Surely this is a more efficient and humane response than providing ill-fitting cast-offs to the 6,000 desperate people living in appalling conditions which our government refuses to do anything about.
Vivienne Barton
Brighton
• If people really want to view these undoubtedly “iconic” outfits (Thatcher dresses go under hammer, 3 November), they should do it via the only means that PM Thatcher herself would have approved of: private enterprise. Let them pay in some non-public setting to see such wonders.
Gary Bennett
Exeter
• What’s become of Margaret Thatcher’s hats? When she was a junior minister at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in the early 1960s, she regularly wore a hat while sitting at her desk, which was vastly amusing for the civil servants (of whom I was one).
Robin Wendt
Chester
• In my day the main difference between the two rugby codes (Letters, November 4) was that union chaps eventually ended up at the local infirmary, whilst the league oiks had to use the local general hospital.
Ken Ducker
Yorkley, Gloucestershire
• Are these letters about dispiriting phrases designed to “raise awareness”?
Nick Beale
Exeter
