On Cup final day, I enjoyed reading DJ Taylor’s article on the football novel (Review, 27 May). However, in discussing the first wave of football fiction, largely describing boys’ school stories, he noted that their “real-life, public-school attending equivalents would, of course, have played rugby”. This perpetuates the error, which I thought had been laid to rest, that independent schools shunned football. As an example, before professionalism took hold, Old Etonians contested no fewer than six FA Cup finals, winning two of them. One of their losses was against Old Carthusians.
Ed Lilley
Bristol
• Comforting though it is to see that Oxford students will have to study for exams on “non-British, non-European” topics (Report, 29 May), I wonder whether they might consider studying non-English “British” topics? What does the average student know, for instance, about the Rebecca Riots, the Treason of the Blue Books, Tryweryn, Senghennydd, Pont Trefechan? But then it’s only Wales, so it doesn’t matter, does it?
Dr Meg Elis
Caernarfon, Gwynedd
• I interpreted your photo of two smiling girls with two armed policemen very differently from Andrew McKeon (Letters, 30 May). It pleased me to see that our police are not seen as heavy-handed repressors of the populace but as friendly trusted protectors of communities.
Michael Miller
Sheffield
• Richard Shipp (Letters, 30 May) could move to one of the many areas in which plastic bags have for some time been recycled. Better, he could campaign for his own local authority belatedly to implement such a policy. Tough choices, perhaps, but far less drastic than boycotting the Saturday Guardian.
Richard Allen
Cambridge
• For many years I have been sending plastic/polythene wrappers and any clean polythene to a recycling firm in Norwich, called Polyprint. Richard Shipp could do the same and continue to buy the Saturday Guardian.
Helen Owen
Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire
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