Re “favourite tales from my teaching days” (Letters, 15 November), I recall my class of 10-year-olds at a Leeds middle school in the mid-1970s. At the end of the summer term we reviewed everyone’s accumulated art work for the year. One child’s assessment of his own work: “Not worth keeping. Bin it!” I binned it, all of it. Damien Hirst continues to produce works of art, I hear.
H Jane Martin
Leeds
• Re your article (Urban gulls target school break times for food, says report, 10 November), gulls have spent millions of years dealing with tide timetables around the world, waiting for the tide to go out and reveal their dinner. The timing of the arrival of trucks to landfill sites and school dinner times will surely be far easier to work out!
Sara Robin
York
• I’m 81 and have been a member of several leftwing organisations. We had one sure way of knowing who was spying on us (Tariq Ali spied on by at least 14 undercover officers, inquiry hears, 11 November). They were the only ones who paid their subs regularly.
Ron Gould
Brighton
• Lewis Hamilton’s achievement is not an “enormity”, as your photo caption in the print edition suggests (Hamilton secures record seventh title, 16 November), though some would say that motor racing itself might qualify as such.
Ray Chenery
Darwen, Lancashire
• Have any fellow readers been able to find a solution to the practical problem of how you separate stuck-together pages of the Guardian while reading it on a train, when a mask rules out the usual options of blowing or licked fingers?
Terry Cook
St Albans, Hertfordshire
