Elizabeth Alker’s article on Paul McCartney’s interest in avant-garde music is fascinating (‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage’: Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ debt to great avant-garde composers, 19 August). But she omits his attendance at a production of Michael Tippett’s last opera, New Year, whose music incorporated rap and reggae, reduced the strings in the orchestra, and included saxophones, percussion and electronic space music. McCartney was so fascinated that he requested a meeting with the composer, which I arranged. The octogenarian Tippett and the young McCartney got on like a house on fire.
Meirion Bowen
London
• Your article (Teach boys and girls together about menstruation, UCL study argues, 20 August) brought me the lovely memory of my then seven-year-old son, who returned from school one day in the 1980s saying that they had had sex education. The boys were in a separate room from the girls, but he told me it didn’t matter because he talked to a girl at breaktime and “she told me all about periods and cemetery towels”.
Alyson Elliman
Carshalton, London
