Letters to the Editor - April 2011

A mention of formic acid in ‘The secret life of ants’ (Feb) brought
back vivid memories of my stay,

aged seven, in a Swiss-German Kinderheim, near St Moritz, in 1946. The principal, a formidable grey-haired matriarch known to us all as Tante Lina (Aunt Lina), would take us for long healthy walks in the pine forests.

When she spied an ants’ nest, a huge (to us) heap of chewed vegetable matter, she would gather us round her and knock the top off. After patting the palm of her hand lightly and rapidly up and down on the revealed frantic inhabitants, she would place her hand over the nose and mouth of any child who suffered from a respiratory weakness and direct them to inhale deeply.

Such was our love for and trust of her that we obeyed without hesitation.

More than sixty years later I can instantly conjure up the sharp cleansing acidity coursing through my bronchial tract, and a resistance to its attackers.

Zoe Bradshaw, Okehampton

On reading The Secret Life of Ants (Feb) I was reminded of an incident in India during the war.

We left a mug with sugar in it on an office desk, and ants got in. To stop this we placed the mug in a soup plate of water … it did not stop them — instead, a large number of them committed suicide, making a bridge for the others to cross over.

Ernest Woodger, Buckhurst Hill

I have just read ‘How to catch a mole’ (Jan).

Whilst one appreciates the efforts of traditional molecatchers in avoiding the use of poison or overly cruel traps in removing moles from places where their burrowing activities may prove genuinely dangerous, one questions the general assumption that the preservation of lawns and flowerbeds justifies the wholesale slaughter of these engaging little members of our British fauna.

Have we not inflicted enough misery and destruction on British wildlife without endeavouring to send our garden moles to Hades?

I find mole hills rather attractive: they are interesting evidence of the subterranean activities of our talpine cousins, whose furtive lives seem far too fascinating to make me yearn for their untimely destruction.

Sometimes, mole hills contain real treasures from beneath the soil, such as old coins and flint tools, that we would never find otherwise.

Please let us all leave our moles in peace.

Anthony Adolph, Beckenham

During a recent edition of the Weakest Link, Ann Robinson asked a question that included the phrase “when Yorkshire was a county”. 

In fact Yorkshire is still very much a county. The programme production team’s error is not an uncommon one in the media and elsewhere. 

In 1974 the Govern­ment created four new Government Administrative Areas (GAAs) that they thoughtlessly named using the name of the geograph­­ical county called York­shire. They called these four new GAAs North, South, East and West Yorkshire. But they are not new counties. They are merely GAAs.

Similar situations probably exist elsewhere in England, Wales and Scotland. 
One I am aware of because I live in Hampshire is that of the 1974 GAA called Dorset. The county of Dorset is still the same as it was before 1974, but the GAA called Dorset includes Bournemouth. Thus the inhabitants of this town live in the GAA called Dorset, but they also live in the county called Dorset. 

That is even worse and more thoughtless than the Yorkshire misnomer.

David Burdett, by email

In the churchyard of the parish church of St Wystan, Repton, in Derbyshire, a tombstone to a youth called Samuel Marshall Baker records his murder in 1786. It shows an axe lopping off a branch from a vigorous oak, with the following verse:

By murderous hand my thread of life was broke
Dreadful the hour and terrible the stroke
Repent, thou wicked spoiler of my youth,
Behold me here, consider parents both.
See from thy bloody hand what woes arise
While calls for vengeance pierce the lofty skies.
Thou too must suffer, tho’ thou ’scape the laws
For God is just and will avenge my cause.

Samuel Marshall Barker, aged 21, who unfortunately fell victim to a barbarous assassin, 4th February 1786

The next tombstone is for his father, who died the following year.
As children, we were told that the assassin was indeed caught and hanged from a tree overlooking the village.

Michael Auden, by email

Even in oil-rich Norway, successive governments have made it their business to try to ensure that rural residents enjoy the same standard of living as those in the cities.

At one filling station high up on the Dovre Jjell, a remote and sparsely populated area, I saw people using a ‘ration book’ system entitling them to fuel at a reduced rate.

Time for our government to help rural communities — and farmers and their workers — who must own four wheels to exist.

G H Cole, Cockermouth

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