Your Letters
16:43 UK time, Monday, 21 January 2008
Could Peter Hain be the 'donor kebab' eaten by a senior minister that you mention in today's PM?
Dan, Oxford, UK
Dammit, Paper Monitor. Mistyping "doner kebab" as 'donor kebab' in a story about the Labour Party. There's a brilliant joke to be made here, if only I were cleverer.
Paul Taylor, Manchester, UK
Re today's Paper Monitor, why is it that when i write to a certain ferry company (who will at the moment remain nameless) to complain that a member of their staff threw an item at me all i get is a letter saying "yeah, sorry about that, we'll certainly look into it" (ok, that wasn't verbatim, but it was a fob-off) and yet jeremy paxman's washing machine eats his socks quicker than usual and M&S ask him to lunch? not exactly "treating customers fairly" is it!
sarah b, IOW, uk
Wow - I'm really excited. I'm presuming that, because Mr Rose has invited JP to lunch to discuss his correspondence about his problem underpants in more depth, this means that I'm about to get a lunch invite to discuss my bad experiences of their online shopping... Or am I being really naive?
Aqua Suliser, Bath
Re the Independent, I have been buying the Indie for about 10 years or so, and still intend doing so. Why? Because it's a campaigning newspaper whose campaigns I agree with. I don't buy a paper for the news coverage, what appears in the paper on a Tuesday I have already seen on bbc.co.uk on a Monday, however it is the analysis and campaigning style that I like and read, plus the Thursday column by Cooper Brown! Long live The Indie.....
Simon, Colchester, UK
The piece of furniture in the Banksy in Bristol is a Tallboy (Me and my Banksy). Tallboy was the name given to a 5 ton bomb used by the RAF to destroy dams etc in World War II. Could this be the explanation?
Lesley, London
May I be the first to wish everybody a happy 'most miserable day of the year'.
Mandy, Noordwijk , Netherlands
Re so, who at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ can't count? If a document is due to be released into the public domain in 2021, but the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ gets it in 2008, that's only 13 years, not 17. Where was Mike Thomson educated?
Angela Hodgson, Barnsley, UK
When considering words you have difficulty pronouncing it is best to try to find a similar word that you are very familiar with. For PM, for example, it might be best to think of February as Feh-brewery.
Phil, Guisborough
I am a bit surprised at an error in your phonetic pronunciations guide. You use kh for the sound in Scottish loch, but also give it as in German ich. As I'm sure you know really, ch in German has two values: kh as in Buch, and the softer sound (almost sh) after i, ei and consonants. Please correct this.
Tim Gossling, Cambridge UK
re: 10 things we didn't know last week, number 9 I believe to be in error as a black hole absorbs perfectly all wavelengths of light at all angles and is, by your own definition, a black hole. Technically it's not a material and the only reason light doesn't escape it is due to the bending of spacetime caused by the singularity at the centre infinitely streching the light to infinite wavelength (zero energy).
Cheers! Dave
David Hillier, Bristol, England
Your item that carbon nanotubes are the closest thing yet to an ideal black material is not exactly correct. As Fathers Ted and Dougal once discussed at great length priest's socks are in fact the only true black objects known to man - although some things are a very very very very very, very very dark blue and so they may appear black.
Steve Coglan, Accrington
Re 10 Things - there is no such thing as pure black. Perhaps the closest you'll get is the cover of Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove. In the words of Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnell, "How much more black can you get? The answer is none... more...black".
Phil Axmendale
The 
