Leg-lengthening history | Northern aunts | In the slow lane | Qatar World Cup boycott | Country diary praise
Your fascinating article on leg-lengthening (9 November) says the apparatus for this was first used in the UK in 1989. I had polio in 1957, which left me with one leg shorter than the other. It was stretched by just over an inch – with what sounds very like the apparatus you refer to – in the Nuffield orthopaedic centre in Oxford in 1963, when I was 10.
Ian Lewis
Hope Mansell, Herefordshire
• When I was teaching in East Sussex, the school put on a production of James and the Giant Peach. “Who do we think should play the two aunts?” I asked staff in my Liverpool accent (Letters, 8 November). A puzzled (southern) teacher said: “There are no ants in James and the Giant Peach.”
Sue Leyland
Hunmanby, North Yorkshire