Your choice of verb (NHS crisis exiles children to Scotland for specialist care, 12 December) must have made many Scottish readers sigh. “Exile” is an emotive way to describe a journey to the top third of our island. It shows an attitude all too commonly found in articles about anything from national house prices to public transport, where “the north” turns out to mean nothing further north than Newcastle, and where “national” maps are sometimes cut off at the Borders. Your headline could just as well have read “Scotland’s specialist care units welcome children denied beds in England”.

Susan Tomes

Edinburgh

• Ho ho ho? No no no! Far from being “false news”, as Kevin Meethan asserts (Letters, 12 December), the existence of Father Christmas is a superb contemporary example of profound myth. The good news is, there is more than one kind of truth; the false news is that “existence” is limited to certain physical forms. Christians believe that Christ is, in some sense, the “logos” truth; this casts no doubt whatsoever on the fact that Father Christmas is the “mythos” truth in which so many “millions” of us are currently (merrily) “colluding”.

Father Alec Mitchell

Manchester

• At age five I was disappointed to discover that Santa didn’t really exist. This was nothing compared with the devastation I experienced two years later when I worked out that God didn’t exist either.

Dr Allan Dodds

Nottingham



• Does Nicky Morgan not know the cost of a Savile Row suit? (Theresa May trousers row: angry text exchange between Tories revealed, theguardian.com, 11 December)

Victoria Paleit

Southmoor, Oxfordshire

• Geneticists have shown that one in 10 people, throughout the world and since humanity began, was not sired by the person they believe to be their father. This renders everyone’s research into their forebears totally meaningless (Opinion, 8 December).

J David Ruddlesden

Burton upon Trent, East Staffordshire

• There are roses, hollyhocks, primroses and antirrhinums all flowering simultaneously in the garden (Letters, 12 December).

Pauline Wilson

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

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