Dr Jahangir Alom (Letters, 17 November) raises an important issue regarding midlife health checks. He rightly points out that people (especially men) from certain cultural backgrounds not engaging with vital NHS checks is a problem which needs to be solved. I wonder, though, how many other people in their late 60s, living in east London like me, have just found out through the Guardian letters page that these health checks exist. Could it be that many of those who aren’t engaging with the process simply haven’t been told that there is a process with which to engage?
Name and address supplied
• At 85, I don’t remember ever having been invited to a health check. When I went for my Covid jab, I asked if I would be offered one and was told: “If you don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.”
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife
• Tourists are known as emmets in Cornwall, not grockles (‘Kindle a fire and enjoy complete solitude’; a magical winter cottage in Cornwall, 19 November). The word is from the Cornish dialect of Old English æmete from which the modern English word ant is derived.
Ruth Hitches
Falmouth, Cornwall
• Like Birmingham and Manchester, we are also fed up with our overpriced, overcrowded and overlong Christmas market (‘It’s overpriced tat’: Christmas markets divide opinion across the UK, 18 November). We call it the Shed Show.
Julia Edwards
Winchester
• In what other “sport” do some of the participants regularly die (Cheltenham in sombre mood as three horses die on one day of racing, 17 November)?
Jenny Haynes
Barton on Humberside, Lincolnshire
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