Graham Long (Country Diary, 19 March) muses: “Can there be any doubt that these [beech trees] will die if the ponies succeed in ring-barking them?” In Stratford Park, Stroud, there is a beech tree, probably nearing its 100th birthday, that was thoroughly ring-barked more than 25 years ago by a tree surgeon with a regional reputation. Today it remains as well as ever. Could ponies have been more destructive than a chainsaw?
Ron Birch
Coleford, Gloucestershire
• Simpsons writer Dan Greaney did paint a “horrifying and fantastical vision of the future” in caricaturing Donald Trump in a 2000 episode (Simpsons prophecy, 18 March), but he was beaten to the draw by Bob Gale who, in the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, created the casino-financed Biff Tannen whom he later said had been inspired by Trump.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
• A Philip K Dick story, What the Dead Men Say, written in 1963 and published in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1964, predicted the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1968. The difference is that Nixon did become president.
Neil Ferguson
London
• We are told (Report, 19 March) that on a previous break in Lanzarote the prime minister was “bitten by a jellyfish”. Let’s hope that on his return from his latest trip he is not stung by a dog.
Arthur Lloyd
Aberdour, Fife
• I searched in vain for your Paul Daniels 12 page pull-out tribute (Obituary, 18 March), then realised that you’d produced an invisible one. He’d have liked that.
Bill Hawkes
Canterbury
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
