David Attenborough’s call for urgent action to companies responsible for producing plastic (Report, 14 May) should also be directed at the NHS, which discards vast quantities of single-use plastic products and packaging every day. Most could be redesigned to eliminate waste. The NHS should require its suppliers to do so. Public services should lead by example.
Nick Wright
South Brent, Devon
• Taking your own containers for takeaway food (Adrian Chiles, G2, 16 May) is nothing new for us ex-East End kids. We were always sent with a china pudding bowl and a china jug for pie and mash or stewed eels and liquor. There was never any waste.
Peggy Alderson
Stevenage, Hertfordshire
• How exciting to decode the Voynich manuscript (Report, 16 May). Could the Queen and her court “conducting trade negotiations from her bath” be interpreted more prosaically and practically as an image of a birthing pool? The ladies all look pregnant and in some pain. It is common in medieval manuscripts for marginal images to have no apparent link to the text.
Dr Margaret Coombe
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
• I studied Lawrence in the same class as (Sir) Hayden Phillips and chose Sons and Lovers as a school prize, presented by Jacob Bronowski, who thought it a little risque. Meanwhile, my mother at home was reading Lady Chatterley (Letters, 17 May) concealed in a copy of Woman’s Realm.
Peter Baker
Leicester
• I hate it when the good and the famous die. The letters get relegated to a single page and we lose the nice picture. That’s twice this week.
Mike Lowcock
Crewe
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