Friday the 13th was a very strange day, with only a walk around Stourhead gardens lifting the gloom. However, the front cover of the Travel section last Saturday really cheered us up! We can confirm that climbing through the Mên-an-Tol does work! Our daughter Imogen was born 21 years ago, nine months after our first visit to this wonderful place. We now visit as a family every year to crawl through the hole for our continued health and wellbeing. This will be even more essential in the next five years.
Susan Trigger and Ged West
Lower Bemerton, Wiltshire
• I could not agree more with Jon Trickett (Report, 20 December) that the elevation of Zac Goldsmith to the House of Lords flies in the face of real democracy. However, Jon’s Labour party did exactly the same thing when they sent Oona King to the Lords in 2011. She had been rejected as MP by the voters of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and failed to win the nomination as Labour candidate for London mayor in 2010.
Dr Iain Ferris
Pembrey, Carmarthenshire
• In 1940 the Ministry of Information created an Anti-Lies Bureau to collect and refute rumours and lies during the second world war. Can I propose that the impending 80th anniversary should be marked by the re-establishment of such an office? Maybe the Guardian’s readers’ editor could run it.
John Lace
Eastbourne, East Sussex
• Re Margaret Hall of Cambridge’s letter (19 December) asking someone to buy a suit for Dominic Cummings for Christmas, what’s happened to all the fancy dress outfits that Boris wore for a few minutes on the campaign trail, to convince us he was a “man of the people”? Butcher, bus driver, baker, fishmonger, pie-maker, bricklayer, milkman…
Julia Phillips
Bath
• A new suit for Dominic Cummings? Would that be a space suit, for a voyage to Mars?
Anne Unseld
Beckenham, London
• I always thought Lady Margaret Hall was in Oxford, not Cambridge.
Kenneth Atkin
Richmond, London
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