Your article on the Labour MP Clive Lewis (‘Switch to green lifestyles must start now’, 2 January) refers to his Norwich South majority prior to 2017 as “wafer-thin”. It was in fact 7,654 in 2015. I was canvassing as the Green party candidate in 2017 and found that the term “on a knife edge” was being used widely. The spin worked. The voters swallowed this myth that they had to vote Labour “to keep the Tories out”. Green and Liberal Democrat voters fell for the two-party story, instead of voting for the candidate they believed in, and Lewis’s majority doubled to 15,596.
Richard Bearman
Norwich
• My copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol measures 1.5 x 2 inches (Reading the small print, 3 January). Printed in 1905 by Chapman and Hall, it is leather-bound, with 352 pages and seven illustrations. It was given to me as a child in the 1950s and I have read it every Christmas since.
Joanna Moody
Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire
• Would it be possible for you to have just one positive news item each day? I felt quite low by the time I got to page 5 of Friday’s paper!
Ruth Baden
Seer Green, Buckinghamshire
• The letters thread mentioning English equivalents of foreign towns is beginning to get tedious, and it is time for it to end. I can but live in Hope (Derbyshire).
Dave Barrett
Bath
• Pennsylvania is a small village in Gloucestershire, near Petty France.
Geraldine Blake
Worthing, West Sussex
• Far side of the moon (Touchdown, 4 January)? I don’t think so. It is very clearly my neighbour’s back garden.
Gordon Mott
London
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