YOU never fail to amaze me, dear readers. We have, I believe, the biggest letters space of any Scottish daily paper to fill on a daily basis – 2,400 words Monday to Friday, 1,800 on a Saturday, 1,650 on a Sunday. So make that roughly 15,500 words a week. It's a lot to find.
Invariably, you rise to the task. Every single day I have difficult choices to make: what am I going to have to leave out?
In some ways, it's been a strange year for our correspondents to get their teeth into: yes, we had the council elections in May, but for the first time in what seems an age, we haven't had any parliamentary elections to discuss. Still, we've had a war in Europe, three prime ministers, four Chancellors, two monarchs, soaring energy bills, rampant inflation, a heatwave and a big freeze. Not such a dull year.
As has been the case since at least 2013, however, the issue of Scottish independence has dominated our mailbag. I'm beginning to think that like death, taxes and Hull 802, this one will always be with us. By and large your contributions have been cogent and civil, a standard that should be the envy of certain other forums. (Or should that be fora? There's another topic to debate.)
That to me is one of the joys of our Letters Pages. Of necessity, we devote a substantial proportion of our space to the weighty issues of the constitution, Westminster politics, the state of the NHS, austerity and more, and just this week, gender recognition reform and abortion have been to the fore. But you always come up with a variety of topics to keep our pages fresh and interesting.
In the last few days we have been talking about men wearing shorts in winter, and throughout the year the use and abuse of the English language have been a constant bugbear for many (see fora, above). But we have had enjoyable discussion of among other things, and in the time-honoured phrase in no particular order, the anglicisation of Gaelic, the relative merits of Burns v McGonagall, palindromes, limericks, the best of Bud Neill, the virtues of micturition in gardening, clothes horses and kitchen pulleys – memorably, Mary Duncan with "for many years, I mostly dried our washing on the outside lines in the garden, but never the undergarments of my husband and myself – these always went on the pulley in the kitchen. My son, visiting one day, looked up and said "It's like the geriatric department of Ann Summers in here'".
Sorry, that was remiss of me. There have been far too many gems this year for me to highlight one little nugget. Best for me just to sign off with a heartfelt thank you to you all.
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