Thanks to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett for encouraging me in my herculean efforts to reduce my book collection – 350 have gone to the Oxfam bookshop in the last year (Reading is precious. But the cult of book ownership can be smug and middle-class, 23 January). Mindful of the excellent Japanese term tsundoku that she mentions, if I decide I am unlikely to read – or reread – them, out they go.
Caroline Ewans
London
• I also remember the day King George VI died (Letters, 23 January). Like Edward Spraggon, I was four; and lived in Newcastle upon Tyne. I spent the whole day singing “The king’s dead” to the tune of The Keel Row. My embarrassed mother could not stop me singing it, even on the bus into town. This was well before I knew the word republicanism.
Joanna Liddle
Ledbury, Herefordshire
• My most profound and long-lasting childhood memory is of seeing the bodies of six people I knew laid on the pavement outside our house. It was November 1940. I think I can claim to have been a remainer since the age of five.
Neil Gadsby
Balscote, Oxfordshire
• Anybody else think it ironic that the owner of vast tracts of open moorland is a hedge fund manager (Thousands march across Dartmoor to demand right to wild camp, 21 January)?
Toby Wood
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
• Can Jacinda Ardern please come and be our prime minister (New Zealand: Chris Hipkins taking over from Jacinda Ardern on Wednesday, 22 January)?
Christine Khawaja
Yateley, Hampshire
