What a pity the TV show What’s My Line? is no longer current. Your article (Wombats’ deadly bums: how they use their ‘skull-crushing’ rumps to fight, play and flirt, 4 November) describes Alyce Swinbourne as an expert in wombat bottoms. She must be the butt of a lot of jokes.
Audrey Butler
Cheadle, Cheshire
• Easing the pain of lockdown with a glass of Yorkshire’s most palatable export – Theakston’s Old Peculier – I am distressed to find the instruction “serve chilled” on the bottle. Have effete lager-drinking southerners finally corrupted the palates of brewers in God’s Own Country?
John Curran
Ashtead, Surrey
• Re swede (Letters, 5 November), where I come from, Hull, a turnip is a largish vegetable with yellow flesh, while a swede is smaller, with white flesh. In Hampshire, where I live, the opposite applies. This division seems widespread, but I would love to know where the dividing line is.
Dr John Fisher
Eastleigh, Hampshire
• In Wales we eat ponch maip, boiled swede and potatoes (in roughly equal measure) mashed with loads of white pepper and butter. It’s absolutely delicious.
Ieuan Roberts
Glyn Ceiriog, Clwyd
• Rafael Behr says Boris Johnson is too lazy for fascism (Trump and Johnson have shown countries need leaders, not celebrity politicians, 3 November). True. Mr Cummings, however, maybe not so much.
Helene Grygar
Bampton, Oxfordshire
• You describe Tom Hornbein (Birthdays, 6 November) as an anaesthesiologist. Do you perhaps mean anaesthetist?
Dr Patrick Hoyte
Wootton Courtenay, Somerset
