Thank you, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, for encapsulating some of my confused feelings about my country (“When we asked the Queen to tea with Paddington, something magic happened – the most lovely goodbye”, Comment). It’s been years since I stood for or sang the national anthem and I was sick of all the oleaginous twaddle about Elizabeth II before it even started. Yet I love the union jack (while tending to dislike people who love it) and I’m a patriot (while often detesting patriots). Cottrell-Boyce’s final line is wonderful: “I’m thankful for the way she used the peculiar power of her archaic role to allow us to glimpse, however fleetingly, that we share something good and that we need to defend that.”
Antony Hay
London SW17
I am no royalist, not even British. Nor was I born before, during or immediately after the Second World War, but it couldn’t have been said better: the death of the Queen feels huge for exactly the reason Frank Cottrell-Boyce points out: with her died the last Zeitzeuge of a time when humans were determined to build better societies, here and in most of Europe.
Anette Magnussen
London E3
It’s not easy to capture succinctly the nature of the profound and disturbing shift that has occurred in public discourse in recent years. However, in his beautiful and insightful article, Frank Cottrell-Boyce absolutely nailed it: “Ten years ago, we lived in a world of divided opinion. Now, we live in a world of divided reality.”
Paul Hancock
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
After reading your article by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, I find myself yet again crying with grief at the loss of her Majesty the Queen. My outpourings have utterly surprised me and I believe many people have had similar experiences. They just keep crying. Which is why it has prompted me to book train tickets from Congleton to the funeral on Monday. We want to be there, close to the Queen, to be part of history. We don’t even have to be that close. We want to pay our respects to our monarch who dedicated her life to public service and touched hundreds of people with her kindness and warmth. We also want to pay our respects to the King and the royal family and share in their grief. The world will never be the same.
Suzie Akers Smith
Congleton, Cheshire
Kenan Malik writes that we should respect the public mood, but do we really know what the public mood is (“We can respect popular opinion for the Queen and question the idea of royalty”, Comment)? On the one hand, I see wall-to-wall media coverage about mourning, grief, loss, eulogies, with not a dissonant voice. On the other, not a single person I know is experiencing an iota of grief at the death of a rich old lady they never knew. My teenage children say that none of their friends at school cares. I would suggest that a sizable minority of people, possibly even a majority, simply do not care, but this is a truth that dare not be told. Pious platitudes and sentimentality abound, no one dares stick their head above the parapet and say “whatever”.
Patrick Morrello
Manchester
In your report (“What people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland think of their new king”, News), I was taken aback to read that “workmen erected a scaffold in preparation for the King’s visit to Hillsborough this week”. It took years and a civil war for Charles I.
Jan Wiczkowski
Prestwich, Manchester
The key to lower energy bills
Michael Savage is quite right but it didn’t have to be like this (“Insulate homes or energy crisis will get worse, ministers told”, News). Imagine reducing your energy bill from £2,500 to £250 annually. This is the experience of those living in houses designed or retrofitted to Passivhaus standard. Rather than subsidising the profits of energy companies and the bonuses of their directors, the government could have been spending our billions on improving the fabric of our nation. In addition, comfort is improved, fuel poverty reduced and a sizable contribution to cutting our carbon emissions made. It could be funded through the savings in energy bills and last for the life of the buildings rather than the winter or two planned by government.
As always, the key to low bills is low consumption. When will all the financial wizards in government realise this and act for the long term? I don’t hold out much hope, given how little we learned from the energy crisis of the 1970s.
David Hayhow
Chew Magna, Somerset
Save our sign language
Following on from Susan Hook’s interesting letter (“Being multilingual helps free the mind”), there has been a century-long discourse about the role of sign language for deaf children, ignoring the extensive research into bilingualism amassed to demonstrate the benefits of learning two or more languages. As with spoken languages, it was thought that bilingualism in sign language and a spoken language would confuse the deaf child learner. This ignores the biological suitability for deaf people, as sign languages are visio-spacial languages; we are in our element when we sign, just as hearing people are when they speak.
Research by Deaf EXperience Ltd (DEX) found that British Sign Language is endangered, since only 4,000 out of 54,000-plus deaf children in the UK are learning BSL. This is because almost all deaf children have hearing parents who do not know sign language. To address this urgent and dire situation, there must be a concerted effort to save our precious community’s sign language before it is too late.
Jill Jones, chair, DEX
Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Proud guardians of rhetoric
Andrew Anthony claims that speechwriters are “unsung and uncelebrated” (“Speech! Speech! Let’s hear from those who actually write them”, the New Review). From the era of Ovid to Alexander Pope, if you wanted an elite education, you studied rhetoric. You learned the subtle and intricate art of writing speeches because that was how you became effective in public life. Shakespeare was a speechwriter, Milton was a speechwriter, Winston Churchill was a speechwriter. Far from being a “semi-hidden profession” that has “mushroomed”, we’re the proud guardians of an esoteric flame in a dark age of scientism and PowerPoint slides.
Brian Jenner, founder of the European Speechwriter Network
Bournemouth
