Can we please stop comparing Donald Trump to a small child? (What to do when your president has a temper tantrum, 6 November). Toddlers have much to learn about acceptable social behaviour, but they are not stupid, vindictive or malicious. Everything they do is rational, at least in their terms. We can’t say the same of Trump.
Dr Cary Bazalgette
London
• Children forgetting how to use a knife and fork (Children regressing and struggling mentally in lockdown, says Ofsted, 10 November)? Many are living hand to mouth.
Margaret Waddy
Cambridge
• Amid all the discussion of swedes, turnips etc (Letters, 10 November), I’ve been wondering how the German term “mangel-wurzel” (lacking root) crept into rural dialect. Incidentally, the first winter of the first world war was known in Berlin as “the turnip winter”, and a series of austerity recipes in a women’s magazine of 1941 is heavily reliant on swede in a variety of forms.
Dr Brigid Purcell
Norwich
• As if 2020 wasn’t already confusing enough, when I had an allotment in County Durham 40 years ago, I, like all Geordie vegetable growers, called the yellow-fleshed root crop I grew swedes. Once on the kitchen table they were turnips.
Dave Dickinson
Cheam, Surrey
• John Curran (Letters, 6 November) interprets the instruction “Serve chilled” on his bottle of Theakston as bowing to effete southern ways. We southerners have to chill our beer in order to approximate what would be room temperature in Yorkshire.
Liz Fuller
London
