Your Edinburgh festival article (‘It’s a brigade of old gits!’ Miriam Margolyes, Andy Linden and the older performers storming Edinburgh, 12 August) mentions Miriam Margolyes’ appearance in the 1963 Cambridge Footlights revue. I stage-managed that show and have many happy memories of it. The custom was that only one girl student would be included in the cast, something Miriam fiercely disapproved of. Still etched in my memory is her line as she sashayed down to front centre stage: “Here I come, one rose in a bunch of pansies!” It was an end-of-an-era moment – the following year there were two girls in the cast.
Tim Fell
Winchester
• Nesrine Malik says 10 out of 14 recent posts on X by Keir Starmer were about immigration and small-boat arrivals (Here’s the truth about Britain’s immigration hysteria: Starmer and co have whipped it up to get cheap votes, 11 August). Well, that really cut through to the racist mob in Nuneaton on Saturday. They ended their protest by marching through the streets chanting “Keir Starmer is a wanker”.
Andy Pettit
Coventry
• Good Friday is not a “movable feast” (Letters, 11 August). Yes, it is movable day, as the date is set according to the lunar cycle, but it is definitely not a feast day. No communion happens. It’s part of the point of the day.
Rev Canon John Longuet-Higgins
Hartpury, Gloucestershire
• So Japanese interval walking is the latest exercise trend (Japanese interval walking: the viral exercise trend that could put a spring in your step, 9 August)? In my younger days, we called it “Scouts’ pace” and knew that it was the quickest way to get anywhere.
Nigel Meredith
Dursley, Gloucestershire
• Surely Jeremy Corbyn’s new party should be called New Old Labour (Letters, 11 August)?
David Prothero
Harlington, Bedfordshire
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