Boots’ attitude to contraception is nothing new (Boots faces boycott over high cost of morning-after pills, 21 July). Up until the 1960s it would not sell condoms at all lest it encourage promiscuity, and even after 1961 staff were reminded that the only exception was “where they are ordered by a medical man himself, or where a genuine prescription is handed in”. Further, Lord Trent, son of Boots’ founding father, asked his co-directors: “Would you like to see your daughters selling these things?”
Dr Kenneth Macaulay
Dunfermline, Fife
• Quick, somebody reassure Gaby Hinsliff (Even if you love your job this new pension age is scary, 21 July) about retirement. You don’t actually stop working, Gaby, they just stop paying you. You get to do everything from befriending hospitals to running the transition movement. This will keep you going well into your dotage.
Chrissy Allott
Exeter
• You report (26 July) that BMW will build an electric Mini near Oxford. We built Microdot, an electric car on a Mini chassis, in Oxford in 1979. Government engineers damned it and frightened away our investors. Better late than never. All vehicles will be electric.
Noel Hodson
Director, Mallalieu Engineering
• Martin Brayne (Letters, 25 July) reminds us of a Jane Austen heroine’s fondness of cricket. Later in the same chapter of Northanger Abbey, we find: “Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls.”
Peter Soar
Shepshed, Leicestershire
• “A rainbow rewards walkers at Nare Head, on Cornwall’s eastern coastline on a blustery evening” (Weather view, 25 July)? I always thought that the eastern edge of Cornwall was Devon.
Robin Luxmoore
Stokesley, North Yorkshire
• Your front page reports rising air pollution and falling sperm counts (Ban from 2040 on diesel and petrol car sales, 26 July; ‘Shocking’ decline found in sperm count of western men, 26 July). Erm, time for some joined-up thinking?
Dr Brigid Purcell
Norwich
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