Your report (2 November) notes the rising hospitalisation rate against the drop in reported Covid cases. Could the drop result from the increased difficulty, since October, in obtaining lateral flow tests? Pharmacies no longer hand them out freely, but need an NHS number and a QR code. It would be too cynical to suggest that this has been put in place to make it look as if Covid infections are on the wane when they could well be increasing.
Nadine Grieve
London
• Tower of Power’s Only So Much Oil in the Ground (1974) has been in my DJ set for years, but Tiny Tim’s The Other Side (1968), with its catchy chorus “The ice caps are melting”, was surely the most prescient, and bizarre, pop music comment on climate catastrophe (Letters, 2 November).
Bryan Biggs
Liverpool
• Andy Bull asks for suggestions for a properly modern pentathlon (3 November). How about baking, carbon footprint reduction, a video shoot-’em-up game, speed dating and working from home?
Tony Gregson
Great Somerford, Wiltshire
• John Harris (3 November) says “period” is American English. I don’t think so. In my Scottish education, which started in the 1950s, it was the standard term. We never used a “full stop”.
Bob Owen
Chetnole, Dorset
• Can people stop going on about raspberries in November (Letters, 3 November)? I still have a clipping of my letter of 29 December 2014; then we still had raspberries.
Theresa Graham
Clevedon, Somerset
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