I have often calculated the volume of different cake tins in my head, and I would find pouring water between tins (which then have to be dried?) much slower and messier (Letters, 14 March). Why the need to denigrate a useful competence? However, it is true that English maths teaching ought to go easier on the fancy stuff and give a really good, useful grounding in arithmetic, estimating, interest rates and so on at GCSE level. For those wanting to go on in maths there could be a separate GCSE exam perhaps, so that the subject is not ruined for the majority who need to be numerate and, at this rate, are not. I include your editors in this category, as it is pretty obvious that silly numbers in an article have meant nothing to them, whereas a misplaced apostrophe or spelling error would have.
Jeanne Warren
Oxford
• Can we take it that Sue Boulding does not use cake tins with removable bases?
Andrew MacGregor
Isle of Colonsay
• Sarah Hughes (Trapped reaches chilling finale, 12 March) is right to pick out the eerie, claustrophobic appeal of Trapped’s snowed-in equivalent of the Agatha Christie country house (not to mention police officer Hinrika’s Fargo-esque hat). But its other glorious appeal was the villagers’ triumph over the arrogant and less-smart-than-they-think suits from Reykjavík.
Steve Gooch
Robertsbridge, East Sussex
• Motorways aren’t much of a test for driverless cars (Driverless cars set for motorway tests next year, Osborne reveals, 12 March). The Turing test equivalent must surely be to negotiate a right-hand turn into the regular queue of traffic in Saffron Walden High Street. When driverless cars can catch the eye of a sympathetic driver, and give a cheery wave of thanks, they will truly qualify for the freedom of Britain’s roads.
Richard Gilyead
Saffron Walden, Essex
• Saturday’s travel section (12 March) included a piece on “head cheese” in Prague. It must have been written by a callow youth. A regular gastronomic feature of my childhood in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1950s was “pig’s head brawn”. Delicious, but seldom seen in the south of England now.
Linda Rhead
Hampton, Middlesex
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