At your service
Sir: National service is a contentious issue with many people including the Armed Forces themselves (‘Identity crisis’, 1 June). National community service might be a far better option whereby everyone reaching the age of 18 would spend a year working in a care home, hospital, day nursery, park, graffiti cleaning, litter clearance and so on – all areas in which help is badly needed.
We have a generation of young people badly affected by Covid isolation and screen addiction and this might help them feel more integrated into society.
The discipline of having to be at work on time every day, the banning of screens during working hours and the realisation that there are many people in the world with problems maybe worse than theirs might equip them rather better for the workplace – which may indeed ultimately include serving with the Armed Forces.
Jenny Fitz Gerald
Gascony
Fat chance
Sir: Max Pemberton was absolutely right when it comes to the cost of the weight-loss drug Ozempic (‘Tipping the scales’, 1 June). While drugs can be helpful for obese individuals in the short term, a pharmaceutical approach to obesity is not just incredibly expensive, it is also impractical and illogical in the long term. The combination of near infinite and constantly evolving demand, allied to finite funding, and uncertain and unclear aspirations will challenge any healthcare system. Drugs are not always the solution.
Sir David Haslam, former chair, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice)
Martinstown, Dorset
A word for our sponsor
Sir: I share Martin Vander Weyer’s concerns regarding diminishing corporate sponsorship of cultural exhibitions (Any Other Business, 1 June). I have enjoyed countless excellent exhibitions over the past 30 years or so, and have been too busy admiring world-class works to take much notice of who sponsored them. I can’t say I’ve ever felt the need to fill up with a particular fuel or change banks because of an impressive exhibition.
I have noticed though, post Covid, that exhibitions are becoming more frugal in respect of what works are on display, and fear the trend will only accelerate. Without corporate sponsors, galleries will surely find it harder to afford the shipping and insurance costs involved in displaying quality artefacts from around the world. I foresee a bleak future, where there are two sorts of arts lovers; those wealthy enough to travel the globe to see works of art in situ, and the rest, paying ever higher admission prices to view increasingly meagre displays, or worse, being fobbed off with so-called ‘immersive’ exhibitions, where there are no original works of art to view, just gaudy blown up projections, with loud unsuitable music and voiceovers telling us what to think.
Martin Brown
Coventry
Life behind bars
Sir: I often agree with Charles Moore, but must challenge his views on London cyclists (Notes, 1 June). I have lived in London since 1972 and cycled from Notting Hill to the Strand for over 42 years.
Cyclists do not dominate London. We are legitimate road users and we are much more vulnerable than motorists, who cause many more accidents, injuries and deaths than cyclists, by a factor of 100 or more. I started to wear a helmet after I read an article saying that the most common cycling injury was to the head and that most were serious. As a husband and father, I decided I should take care of myself. My helmet has saved me from serious injury on several occasions since. Cyclists in London have as much right to be on the roads as motorists and we cause much less pollution and congestion. Time for a rethink and some tolerance, Lord Moore!
Sir Richard Aikens
London W2
Price driven
Sir: Ross Clark’s article on the failure of the EV ‘revolution’ (‘Electric shock’, 25 May) does not surprise me. Two years ago I enquired of a local Hyundai dealer (which also has a Nissan franchise) about buying a new petrol car and offering my (then) three-year-old Nissan Leaf in part exchange. He was unable to accept the Leaf, despite it being top of the range and low mileage. In 50 years of buying motor cars I have never had a part exchange refused until now.
Geoffrey Carr
Melksham
Knives out
Sir: I must take issue with Andrew Watts’s description of the Swiss Army knife as practically useless as a weapon. ‘If you tried to stab anyone with it, you’d do more damage to yourself than your opponent’. (Notes on… Swiss Army knives, 18 May).
My experience in the police force taught me otherwise. My assailant held his Swiss Army knife in his fist, with the blade protruding between his fingers. I thought he had punched my three female colleagues but, in fact, he had put long slashes across their breasts and shoulders. His Swiss Army knife had a three-and-a-half-inch blade but he drove it four-and-a-half inches into me (a quarter of an inch short of my bowels according to the surgeon who operated on me) by the simple expedient of punching it into a soft tissue area. Our attacker was uninjured. Dealing with this stuff is an occupational hazard for police officers.
John Davison, retired chief inspector, Metropolitan Police
Langdon Hills, Essex
Eight lives left
Sir: Peter Fineman’s story of burying a dead cat in someone else’s garden (Letters, 25 May) reminded me of when my sister and I were young and had a pet tabby tomcat called Charlie who was prone to wandering and staying out all night. We arrived back home from a summer holiday to be met by distraught near neighbours who told us that they had found a dead tabby cat on the grass verge outside our house and they had buried it at the bottom of our garden. My sister was very upset and marked the grave with a small jam jar of flowers. Two days later, Charlie wandered into the kitchen, looking a bit thin, with part of an ear missing, but otherwise very much alive. We never did find out whose cat was buried in our garden.
Andrew Waters
Fen Ditton, Cambridge
Last legs
Sir: Mark Mason’s ‘Notes on… Horse Guards’ (1 June) informs us the Household Cavalry Museum has ‘the wooden leg used by the Earl of Uxbridge’. There is another at Plas Newydd, his seat on Anglesey, and the National Army Museum has the actual saw used to amputate his leg. Anecdotally, Uxbridge observed that the surgeon’s knives appeared ‘somewhat blunt’.
His stoicism was matched by his humour since, when later asked about his health, he allegedly would respond that he had ‘one foot in the grave’: his leg was buried near where the surgery took place and, with an inscribed tombstone, became macabrely a shrine attracting paying visitors.
Peter Saunders
Salisbury, Wiltshire
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