I see Boris Johnson called a JCB factory in India a “living, breathing incarnation of the umbilicus between the UK and India” (Outcry in India as Boris Johnson visits JCB plant amid demolitions row, 21 April). This is someone who has a classics degree and doesn’t know that the umbilicus is the navel. Anyone else might have said “umbilical cord”, but he has to pretend that he knows Latin. A poor analogy, anyway, since the cord only serves a useful purpose for nine months.
John Illingworth
Bradford
• It would be a more appropriate analogy to compare Boris Johnson to the incomparable WG Grace (Letters, 22 April). When bowled out in a game, he simply put the bails back on the stumps and said: “They’ve come to see me bat!”
Arif Qawi
London
• Your list of the greatest Annie Lennox songs (21 April) had a glaring omission – 17 Again, from the Eurythmics’ 1999 album Peace, is a bittersweet evocation of lost youth and missed opportunities featuring an emotional delivery by Lennox as she belts out, with mixed feelings: “And it feels like I’m 17 again. Feels like I’m 17.”
Beverley Mason
Cardiff
• According to my dictionary, a spill is “usually or especially accidental”. Can we please change the rhetoric over water firm sewage spills and call them what they really are: sewage dumps (Ban bonuses for water firm bosses until sewage spills stopped, urge Lib Dems, 19 April)?
Pete Lavender
Woodthorpe, Nottinghamshire
• I was just told to say there was trouble at t’mill. I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition (Letters, 25 April).
John Irving Clarke
Wakefield
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