Calls for changes to breast cancer guidelines for GPs are welcome (Report, 4 August). The existing guidelines are irrational. If your grandmother and mother have both had breast cancer, you are still not added to the intensified screening list unless an aunt or great-aunt or sister has also had breast cancer. Hence the system discriminates against families – like mine – with only one woman in a generation.
Helen Hills
York
• It seems that Anna Tims’s correspondent committed the wrong environmental crime (I was fined £500 after putting a coffee cup in a rubbish bag next to a full bin, 3 August). Instead of unwittingly littering, they should have dumped thousands of tonnes of sewage into a river and bagged a multimillion-pound reward.
Matt Sheard
Tayport, Fife
• As a interested follower of the regular letters from the owner of the Gordon Bennett, I offer my sympathies for the loss of his wife and share his frustration at the uncooperative stance of the Canal and River Trust (Letters, 9 July). I write this on the anniversary of my own wife’s death.
JK Mitchell
Dinton, Buckinghamshire
• Commiserations to Ian Grieve on board the Gordon Bennett. He could add to the Nick Cave/Neil Young playlist celebrating his wife’s life. Cave’s The Ship Song and Young’s Birds are sad but also uplifting, like his letter.
Jim Hatley
Brighton, East Sussex
• My mother used to say people with short or long illnesses (Letters, 7 August) “enjoyed ill health”.
Rory Murphy
London
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