We should indeed “be shocked into action by the fact that wealth,class and geography still dictate life expectancy” (Paul Mason, G2, and 1 December). Healthy life expectancy,as he reports, is 16 years less in Blackpool than it is a three-hour drive away in Wokingham. Its a 12-minute drive from where I live in Newcastle to the council ward I represent, or where life expectancy is 12 years less and which is served by the largest food bank in thecountry.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour,House of Lords• Peter Clement (Letters, 27 November), or has missed Robert Frost’s irony – Mending Wall satirises the neighbour’s “respectable fences form respectable neighbours” refrain. The narrator speaks against unthinking isolationism: Why accomplish they form respectable neighbours? ... Before I built a wall Id query to know / What I was walling in or walling out”. Born in San Francisco to a Scottish immigrant mother,Frost was himself a migrant to the UK in 1912-15 before returning to the US.
Dr Huw Davies
SwanseaContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com