A speech therapist once gave me a simple way to help with diaphragmatic breathing (How to take the perfect breath: why learning to breathe properly could change your life, 26 August). Imagine you have a balloon in your stomach, put your hand on your stomach, and breathe in deeply in order to fill the “balloon” and feel it expand beneath your fingers. Similarly, feel it deflate as you breath out. It works for me.
Janice Jowett
Ormskirk, Lancashire
• Re the correspondence (Letters, 25 August) about Rule Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms, I’m old enough at 67 to remember having to stand up in the cinema to sing God Save the Queen at the end of a film. That and the unseemly scramble to get out before it. Times change.
Ruth Pritchard
Rhyl, Denbighshire
• Having received six separately posted identical letters in Thursday’s post regarding the increase in my Guardian subscription, I can definitely say that I have got the message.
Peter Adamson
Peldon, Essex
• Re “proper jobs” having short titles (Letters, 26 August), my grandfather worked at Vickers, Barrow-in-Furness. His job, as specified on my father’s birth certificate, was “Ship’s boiler makers’ riveters’ holder-up”.
John Lydon
Leeds
• Colchester may have been Britain’s first city (Letters, 26 August), but only one city has seen both the English and Scottish parliaments held there: Carlisle. An obvious choice for the relocation of the Palace of Westminster.
Steven Bowditch
Mayor of Carlisle, 2014-15
• How many scapegoats do this incompetent government and the spectacularly incompetent Gavin Williamson actually need (Top DfE official’s exit ‘proof that ministerial accountability is dead’, 26 August)?
Sarah Cemlyn
Bristol
• Join the conversation – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
