The Tory government’s plans to reduce the funding for pharmacies by 6% from October has had little publicity in the media. Pharmacies are an essential part of the NHS and the local community, and this cut is predicted to lead to the closure of one in four of them. A petition to oppose the cuts, which requires 100,000 votes for a parliamentary debate, can be found online at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/116943
Dave Taylor
Purbrook, Hampshire
• Hedgehogs are probably our most- loved garden residents (Notebook, 23 February), so why do gardeners still use slug pellets, which indiscriminately kill not only hedgehogs but also the garden birds that eat slugs and ingest the poison?
Jacky Creswick
Chester
• At my all-boys’ grammar school, woodwork was the poor option (Letters, 27 February). Latin was the subject and so it was amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. Sadly I can’t put a shelf up straight or perform the myriad DIY jobs which would have made my life so much the richer.
Dennis Ruston
Littleover, Derbyshire
• At my small private girls’ school in the 1950s that prided itself on being “academic”, we were not taught cooking and domestic science because it was assumed we would have staff to do it.
Joanna Moody
Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire
• Channel 4 News is on a roll. Recently, the subtitles gave us “Doris Johnson”. On Friday it was this sublime quote from the new head of Fifa, Gianni Infantino: “Fifa will not be run as a private thiefdom.”
Carolyn Kirton
Aberdeen
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
