The question about birthday lists and possible low birthrate in 1945 made me smile (Letters, 20 July). Having consumed a full bottle of dry martini one evening, my elderly mother announced that I was a mistake. Apparently my father had been home on leave from the army and he’d taken my mother to a nearby beauty spot. I was the unexpected result. There was a war on. As to nobody notable or famous aged 77, does a letter in the Guardian not count?
Bob Hargreaves
Bury, Greater Manchester
• I’m sure Joanna Rimmer will be relieved to see three 77-year-olds in Thursday’s birthdays list in the print edition: Wendy Cope, John Lowe and Barry Richards.
Maxine Goda (77 last month)
Liverpool
• There is no better observation on these last days of Boris Johnson’s premiership than in WB Yeats’s poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen: “There lurches past, his great eyes without thought / Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks / That insolent fiend...”
Dean Hawkes
Cambridge
• Rafael Behr is correct about the ridiculous process that the Conservatives are deploying to select their leader and our prime minister (A bitter, unrepentant Boris Johnson will be a curse on the next prime minister, 19 July). Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I suspect that we will be in for more of the same.
Paul Collins
Sale, Cheshire
• Damian Barr (My new garden is blooming – and each plant holds a clue about its previous owner, 20 July) says that it takes a full year to really get to know a garden. After 15 years, I’m still finding out.
Katie Carter
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
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