Rowan Atkinson’s article misses the point (I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped, 3 June). While it is true that the manufacturing of an electric car produces twice the greenhouse gases of a petrol car, when you take the whole 20-year lifecycle into account, the electric car is a winner: it produces less than half the greenhouse gases of a petrol car. When it comes to climate change, we’re out of time.
Andrew Gould
Bosham, West Sussex
• Like Alec Douet’s, my boarding school kitchen had a scarcity of supplies during wartime (Letters, 31 May). We were sent out foraging in the countryside for hazelnuts and chestnuts, sloes, rosehips, blackberries and damsons.
Desmond Painter
Bournemouth
• To help compare how water companies are performing, how about a metric calculated by dividing the amount each pays out in dividends in a given year by the number of litres of sewage they dump in rivers and lakes that year? It could be called the Shit Shareholder Ratio.
Pete Bibby
Sheffield
• We do indeed need the return of Miliband the elder (Letters, 1 June). Unfortunately, Ralph – who wrote the classic book on the history of the Labour party, Parliamentary Socialism – is no longer with us.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
• The Irish call an English measure “a damp glass” (Letters, 2 June).
Cyril Duff
London
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