Living well through adversity
George Monbiot, in his heart-wrenching article about a prostate cancer diagnosis (23 March), suggests that to imagine how much worse things could be is a defining principle for living well through adversity.
There is an ancient story of a devout man who, travelling through a drought-stricken land, arrives at the gate of a beleaguered town. A woman is there gathering sticks and the traveller asks her for a drink and a morsel of bread. The woman replies, “I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”
The story unfolds to reveal the woman baking a small loaf for the traveller and also feeding herself and her son. Returning to Monbiot’s thoughts, maybe it is more beneficial to speak plainly of distress and suffering experienced, and to share the very thing that we count essential to our life and sensibility.
Pauline Harris
Lydney, UK
Alternatives to meat
Professor Eleanor Riley is being extremely myopic in her justification for researching gene-editing in pigs (23 March). Killing purposely bred sentient beings is neither necessary nor the only way of providing nutritional benefits essential to human health; there are alternatives.
Unfortunately, lack of vision and desire for quick and easy profits is preventing serious investment and interest in these alternatives. If money, time and brainpower can be spent researching ways of “safely” perpetuating the needless slaughter of pigs, then it can certainly be spent on the research and development of satisfying, reasonably priced, plant-based foods with which to feed the world. What is missing is the political will and moral courage necessary to make this latter option a reality.
Carol-Mary Fraser
Norwich, UK
Big data background
So glad I retained Carole Cadwalladr’s article Did big data tip it for Brexit? (19 May 2017) and her follow-up Bound together in an unholy alliance (3 November 2017). They deserve a close re-read and add greatly to understanding the latest revelations about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica connection.
Christopher Griffin
Perth, Western Australia
Home is where the heart is
Gaby Hinsliff (Don’t fall for the hype about empty nest syndrome, 16 March) reflects on young adults who – for a variety of reasons – return to their parents’ home, causing stress. Hinsliff says: “As the old saying has it, home is still the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
That “old saying” actually comes from Robert Frost’s poem The Death of the Hired Man. A farm hand has returned to his employers: old, ill and contrite, and the husband sourly remarks, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”
The more compassionate wife replies, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
The one-fourth of young British adults who now live with their parents shouldn’t have to suffer insecure work or unaffordable housing, as Hinsliff rightly points out, but needn’t have to deserve their parents’ love. Three cheers for the parents.
Norbert Hirschhorn
London, UK
Lesson from the Romans
Reading about the attraction of New Zealand as an Armageddon bolthole (9 March), I was struck by the parallel with late antiquity sub-Roman Britain. Roman oligarchs shaken by civil war and insurrection in third-century Gaul sought a safe haven across the channel for their latifundia lifestyle. Buying up sheep station acreage across an ocean seems to be the 21st-century equivalent.
As these third-century archetype venture survivalists reclined smugly in their heated villas, they probably congratulated themselves on their cleverness. Of course, the illusion of a guaranteed, sanitised, safe haven doesn’t actually save anyone in the long run, as subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration from the continent proved. History might instruct these cocksure capitalists.
Bard Stebbins
Baltimore, Maryland, US
Briefly
• Giving birth may add 11 years to a woman’s biological age (9 March). I only had three children and by that calculation I would be 114 now. I still walk up and down mountains. I managed the Wendelstein 14 times, plus several other peaks in 2017. My aim will be the Wendelstein 15 times this year.
B Baguley
Schliersee, Germany
• Re the presumed peaceable encounters between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, as we carry the DNA of both species (Leader comment, 2 March). How naive! Large groups of people, especially in eastern Europe and north-east Asia also carry DNA from Genghis Khan and his warriors – one of many historical, and alas recent and ongoing, examples of what may happen when foreign tribes and the like meet. Not very peaceable.
G Cecilie Alfsen
Oslo, Norway
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