So Liz Truss’s latest wheeze is to launch yet another splinter group within the Tory party, the Popular Conservatives, or PopCon for short (Listen up! It’s Liz Truss and the PopCons, the Tory tribute act sounding a death knell for irony, 6 February). Sounds like a rival to Comic Con, the fan convention where people dress up as characters from fantasy shows, such as Game of Thrones, to pay homage to realities that don’t exist. The perfect name, then.
Ken Abbott
Portishead, Somerset
• All hail Marina Hyde for poking fun at unpopular Liz Truss and her Popular Conservatives. The accompanying photo of a laughing Truss and acolytes has a curiously apt church banner over their heads: “Heal the sick. Cleanse the lepers. Raise the dead. Cast out devils.”
Sally Goldsmith
Sheffield
• My mum used to shout “Do you want some gawp seed?” to people she judged had exceeded her two-second allowance for looking into her windows (Letters, 7 February). I presumed the “seed” would have sustained the gawpers as they moved on to their next window.
Steve Oliver
Wembury, Devon
• Niksen (The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture?, 7 February)? Up here, we prefer hurkle-durkle – a Scots word roughly translated as “to lay in bed or lounge about, way past the time you should be up and about, doing things”. Like writing frivolous letters to the Guardian.
Colin Montgomery
Edinburgh
• If Dr John Doherty is an advocate of niksen, the art of doing nothing, why has he taken the trouble to write to you (Letters, 7 February)?
Kevin Ward
Quorn, Leicestershire
• Do you have a photograph you’d like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers’ best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
