Joel Snape’s piece about backgammon (Forget chess, backgammon teaches the most valuable life lessons: blind luck and wild unfairness, 5 August) was interesting, but he neglected bridge in his ruminations about other games. Bridge is flourishing, especially among young people. England sent four teams to the World Junior Championships in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, where they have been competing with honour against contemporaries from around the world. It’s not just for the more mature.
Ian Payn
Chair, English Bridge Union
• While I agree that backgammon is a better metaphor for life than chess, the advantage of chess is that it can played be in parks using giant sets, which is great fun and very sociable. This is much more common in mainland Europe. My favourite spot is in Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where chess games often go on late into the night.
Marc Tischkowitz
Albury, Hertfordshire
• According to my late mother, Rishi Sunak’s sartorial inelegance (Derek Guy: the notorious fashion tweeter on Sunak’s short trousers, 5 August) is defined by a common 1950s observation of men with this problem: “His trousers don’t talk to his shoes.” Perhaps he is nostalgically seeking to resurrect the style, thus aligning our present period of austerity and economic hardship with life as it was then.
Paul F Faupel
Somersham, Cambridgeshire
• No hosts for the 2026 or 2030 Commonwealth Games (Report, 4 August)? That will be a golden opportunity for Saudi Arabia then.
Rory Murphy
London
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