Iain Hollingshead - Has the World Gone Completely Mad...?: Unpublished Letters to the Daily Telegraph

Has The World Gone Completely Mad ... ?

SIR While attending the cardiac clinic at Papworth Hospital today I ill-advisedly started to read your latest letters book, What Will They Think of Next ... ? Shortly thereafter I succumbed to uncontrollable laughter, much to the annoyance of my fellow patients, who were either waiting for or had recently undergone major heart surgery and were understandably in a sombre mood.

Fortunately, I was accompanied by my wife who was able to apologise to everyone on my behalf as I was unable to speak coherently.

My point, Sir, is that you should, in future editions, list places where reading your book is inappropriate, as this would avoid embarrassment to the reader and irritation to the public.

John Bebbington

Haslingfield, Cambridgeshire

SIR The more I read the Letters page the more I realise just how much politicians are out of step with public opinion. Please can the editor double the space available as the contents are more interesting than most of the copy.

John Armstrong

Peacehaven, East Sussex

CONTENTS

After seven years of writing introductions to these books I worried that I would run out of things to say. Fortunately, while words might fail me, they rarely leave our wonderful correspondents in the lurch. The world poses intractable problems; letter writers to The Daily Telegraph provide innovative solutions. How do we resolve the Greek crisis? Buy the Parthenon, move it to Hampstead Heath and get the Duke of Edinburgh to tell everyone to hurry the **** up. Who should present Top Gear? Miliband, Clegg and Farage and certainly not Chris Evans, even if one of our male readers did once follow him into the ladies loo in a hotel in East Yorkshire. Is Sepp Blatter a cad or a bounder? Even a cad wouldnt wear brown shoes with a dark suit. Where should Londons next runway be built? Calais.

Admittedly, not all the worlds dilemmas are so easily resolved, even by the combined wit and wisdom of our correspondents. How do you explain to your sister which team is actually winning a cricket match? How will Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper manage on only one set of parliamentary expenses? What will David Cameron and George Osborne do with their beloved hi-vis Bob the Builder outfits now that they have won the election? There are, as Donald Rumsfeld said, known knowns and known unknowns. Happily, whether showing a decisiveness or a curiosity all too rare in other walks of life, this year again finds the readers in fine fettle.

I am sometimes asked what makes a good Telegraph letter. Is it the Commodore in chapter seven, flanked, naturally, by a Colonel, wondering what happened to friendly beers after a rugby match? Or the pensioner in chapter eight reminiscing about his mocking Nazi salutes as a Bermondsey schoolboy during the Blitz? The disgruntled wife wondering whether the camera operator on Centre Court at Wimbledon is a man? Or M, our Bristol asset who believes himself to be the head of MI5, producing some torturous logic to prove that Tony and Cherie Blair are in charge of ISIS? (M has shown admirable consistency in this regard; in I Could Go On... he accused Peter Mandelson of orchestrating an assassination in Dubai.)

The answer, of course, is that a good Telegraph letter is all of the above and, above all, the combination of all of the above. The whole is more than the sum of the parts in this eclectic community of scribes, scholars and scoundrels. Our readers speak truth to power and powerful truths. I enjoy their company immeasurably.

It has certainly been a busy year for all letter-writers, whether resident at Clarence House, SW1, or Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire (has it replaced Tunbridge Wells as the Disgusted centre of dissent, wonders one correspondent?). Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband were dispatched by the electorate to spend more time with their hard-working families and their kitchens. Fifty Shades of Grey returned to the headlines, to the consternation of one correspondent who still associates caning with the pain of public school and another, a librarian, who is reminded of her disappointment on first reading Lady Chatterleys Lover. Meanwhile, it has been a bad year for naturists, whether topless tourists arrested on Mount Kinabalu (a surprise for our correspondent who remembers the lovely local ladies of Batavia in 1945) or the topless ladies in the Sun.

2015 has also been a good year for anniversaries: VE Day, which prompts a recollection of anarchy in the ranks in Athens; Churchills death, which draws out a nurse who once took his temperature; Waterloo and Magna Carta, which not even our longest-serving readers are old enough to remember although one does suggest that now would be an opportune moment to relieve the government of its powers and place them back in the hands of the monarch.

I shall spoil the jokes no more. Suffice to say, you hold a bumper collection in your hands and, for that, I am immeasurably grateful, as ever, to Christopher Howse, the Letters Editor; Sally Peck, who mined the inbox once more with great skill; Matt Pritchett; Cerys Hughes; Melissa Smith at Aurum Press; and, of course, our unique and brilliant correspondents. I like to imagine that when the apocalypse comes, they will still find time to dash off a quick letter or two to the Editor, perhaps including a joke comparing the deadly asteroid to the EU, a practical guide to making drinking water out of radioactive puddles and a complaint that the BBC bulletin heralding the end of the world mispronounced the word particularly.

In the meantime, theirs is a welcome voice of sanity in a world which often seems to have gone completely mad.

Iain Hollingshead
London SE22



HOT PANTS

SIR In the heat of last summer I mentioned to a young lady friend that the pansies in her hanging basket would be suffering from dehydration if there was no rain while she was away on holiday.

The following week, with high temperatures and no rain, she emailed me from her holiday, finishing with the interesting line: Goodness knows what state my panties will be in after a week of this heatwave.

I told her she should have taken a spare pair.

John Burney

Melbourne, Derbyshire

SIR Buying a clematis plant recently, my wife and I were reminded that a friends wife, who often organises charity coffee mornings for lady friends, had on one such occasion been addressed thus by the woman next-door:

Oh, by the way, Thelma, will you ask David to trim your clitoris because its growing over the top of the party wall?

Is this a record?

M.C.M.

York

SIR I was once unsteady from excessive sun in Turkey when the owner of a small taverna marched me to a chair and sat me down. He disappeared into his kitchen and returned with an onion, cut in half across the middle.

I had to bare my tummy and he rubbed it vigorously with the cut surface; it felt very cold and I was not fragrant thereafter. It did, however, work.

This is not a spoof.

Mary Crabtree

Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire

SIR One tip for staying cool in a heatwave is to avoid reading any column with a title like, Ten tips for staying cool in a heatwave.

Robin Steggles

Holbrook, Suffolk

SIR During the current heatwave we are being asked to make sure our elderly neighbours are coping with the situation. My wife asked who were our elderly neighbours.

After a pause I replied, We are.

George Brown