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Paella ready to serve
Paella ready to serve: one recipe includes singing birds, writes Roger Thomson. Photograph: Alamy
Paella ready to serve: one recipe includes singing birds, writes Roger Thomson. Photograph: Alamy

A paella with small singing birds, anyone?

This article is more than 7 years old

Dementia | Karl Lagerfeld | Fat Duck | Jamie Oliver | Words for fog

While I have been moved by the coverage of Terry Jones’s dementia (Letters, 6 October), are other readers uncomfortable with the current Doonesbury Classics series in which people are “exploring” in Ronald Reagan’s brain? Since we learned that Reagan had a form of dementia, possibly while he was still US president, it seems inappropriate to repeat these cartoons.
Anthony Marsh
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

Chanel at Paris fashion week. Photograph: Estrop/Getty Images

I wonder whether the all-over futurist clothing from high fashion guru Karl Lagerfeld, with its white plastic robot masks (Chanel goes sci-fi, 5 October), would be acceptable on the beach in the south of France? Far more scary than the burkini.
Jeffrey Tobias
London

“The Fat Duck, which seats only 38 people, gets between 20,000 and 30,000 phone calls a day […] but not many get through” (Fat Duck regains its three-star Michelin rating, 4 October). How did the anonymous Michelin inspectors manage to book eight times?
Dr Ashley Chantler
Wallasey, Merseyside

The recipe for paella a la campina in Spanish Cooking (1957, by Elizabeth Cass, a resident of Gibraltar and a traveller in Spain) includes ham, chicken, chorizo – and small singing birds. Clearly Jamie Oliver was trying to avoid offence by excluding an ingredient (Letters, 6 October; Report, 5 October).
Roger Thomson
Chichester

Childhood holidays on the Yorkshire coast were often subject, not to “sea frets” or “haars” (Letters, 6 October), but to a sea “roke” which, I am told, is, like “reek”, related to the Danish word røg, meaning “smoke”.
Dr John Dent
Melrose, Roxburghshire

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