Mother’s ‘meddling’ kept tablets in order

One reader recalls her mother’s attempts to organise her pillbox. Photograph: lisafx/Getty Images/iStockphoto

In her later years, my mother received a weekly pillbox organised by the local chemist (I’m on nine pills a day now – and I’m not even what you might call ill, 14 December). After a couple of days, she would reorganise it to better use the empty spaces – her mathematical brain coming into its own. It was suggested to carers that they hide the box to avoid the “meddling”. My mother then helpfully told the next carer where the box was.
Elizabeth Monger
Plymouth

• Clearing out my elderly aunt’s seaside flat, we encountered cardboard boxes whose labelling bore little relationship to their contents (Letters, 20 December). Then one was unearthed with the label “old crow”. Agog, we opened it to discover the salt-wind mummified corpse of an old crow.
Richard Ellis
Littleover, Derbyshire