Readers’ letters: Deadly board game, eye tests and MPs

Three and a half years have elapsed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the country’s NATO membership should have been fast-tracked and EU participation given similarly express treatment. Both boats have sailed. Instead it’s beginning to look that after so much death and destruction Putin, Lavrov & Co, the ‘crème de la Kremlin’, are going to get away with it. If only ‘we’ could get off the back foot for once.

It’s often said that military might is about the only language understood by Putin. Unfortunately our military status has been allowed to dissipate, not least by successive bowler and brass hats, who on paper are responsible for UK defence. ‘Yes Prime Minister’ and ‘Dad’s Army’ could have done better.

All this makes you wonder even more about Putin. His ultimate ambition may even go beyond the whole of Ukraine being incorporated in Russia. What really makes him tick? I wonder if he’s into board games to while away the long winter evenings in the Kremlin ‘throne room’.

I imagine him as a chess grandmaster regularly deploying the Putin Gambit. He’d be good at poker, too, assisted by his redundant facial muscles. I expect he could rattle off Top Trumps in a jiffy, probably without blinking. Vlad would relish a round of ‘Moscopoly’ provided he bagged the newly-introduced battle tank counter. I think he’d take to Snakes and Ladders, too; sounds like his kind of game.

No laughing matter in reality, or should that be unreality?

Derek Reed

Middlethorpe Drive

York

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Test could go further

The recently-announced compulsory eye test for drivers over 70s is welcomed by most and takes the guess work from potential dangerous older drivers. But why not extend it to any drivers of mobility scooters, electric cycles, in fact anything that can be driven on the roads (or footpaths).

A mobility scooter or electric cycle travelling 15.5 mph (the legal limit for such vehicles) can and a do inflict an enormous amount of injury to a pedestrian. Likewise any person using an electric vehicle, like other motor vehicle users, should be fined for using mobile phones whilst the vehicle is moving. Are people with potential sight-restrictive illnesses, diabetes for example, to be tested annually for their vision before going out on the roads?

D M Deamer

Penleys Grove Street

Monkgate

York 

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You’ve done a good job

I would like to thank all the District Nurses who have put up with me for the last five years making me better. It’s been a long haul but you have done a very good job. Thank you.

S.Mortimer

Cosmo Ave

York

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MPs are representatives

Dr Scott Marmion takes issue with Rachael Maskell’s failure to resign following the withdrawal of the Labour whip (Letters, August 15). His ad feminam attack on a principled and much respected MP is unworthy of him. MPs are not delegates but representatives. Those who think otherwise, and there are many of them, undermine true democracy. In any event, he cannot have it both ways: it is precisely because Ms Maskell does not hold herself bound by the heresy of ‘my party right of wrong’, that she hardly be criticised for the implied dishonourable things of her former comrades. I am not a member of any political party, nor am I one of her constituents, but by all accounts she is a conscientious representative of those who are, whatever their political allegiance.

Tony Lawton     

Skelton

York