Letter of the week
The advantages of age
BEING able to politely decline invitations to communal viewings of live television coverage of the coronation was one advantage of advanced years. My response was: ‘No thanks, I’ve already seen one’. Alan Field, Nottinghamshire
The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne
Root of all ills
I AM grateful to Jamie Blackett for his thoughtful review of my book, (). He makes an illuminating and troubling observation: ‘Otters ()… are no longer under siege… They recovered strongly a decade ago…’ Well, yes, we all know that. Nor ‘under siege’, in the sense of dangerously. There are quite a lot of them. This might have alerted Mr Blackett (even if my writing is obscure) to the fact that the ‘siege’ in the subtitle is not only or mainly about numbers. The book’s main concern is how humans interfere with the thriving of animals—including ourselves: how we stop them living the lives they should. To measure the thriving of a species only by counting heads shows, I’m afraid, a lack of real empathy. And that’s at the root of many of our ecological and political ills.
