Our new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, once participated in the exportation of English marmalade. So while we should not expect jam today at such short notice, it is not unreasonable to think there might be jam tomorrow, when we might at last be, as an older relative of mine used to sing, “in that happy land … where they eat bread and jam three times a day”.
Ronald Fairfax
Hull
• Neil Macfarlane shouldn’t worry too much about the elderly struggling to answer questions on UK current affairs when taking memory tests during this period of political turbulence (Letters, 14 October). My 86-year-old mother recently passed hers with flying colours and attributes this success to reading the Guardian every day.
Matthew Ryder
Buckden, Cambridgeshire
• You write that the new first mate of Liz Truss’s “listing ship of government … dumped the ballast of her tax changes” (Editorial, 17 October). It is more likely that he opened the bilge – ballast is intended to stop the ship listing and to set in on an even keel. Either way, it looks as if the SS Politician is still headed for the rocks.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
• In the 1960s, our grammar school headmistress solemnly announced that a girl in the sixth form had got pregnant and then added: “I can’t think what got into her” (Letters, 17 October).
Fred Lowe
Furbo, Galway, Ireland
• Every morning assembly would end when we were told: “You may now pass out.”
Louise Cumiskey
West Molesey, Surrey
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