Like James Derounian (‘It gave me such a lift’: Guardian readers’ best films of 2022, 22 December), I enjoyed The Lost King – about the search for Richard III’s remains – as an entertaining, uplifting story of fulfilment achieved against the odds. Contrary to movie PR and most media coverage, however, its key thread is fiction: the “bubble of academic arrogance” is a fantasy of the film’s anti-intellectual agenda. The actual archaeological project was an exemplary case of university archaeologists and administrators listening to and working with an amateur historian.
Mike Pitts
Editor, British Archaeology
Bread sauce (Letters, 25 December) should be consigned to the bin alongside spotted dick and bread and butter pudding. And as for bread sauce sandwiches – yuck. They all remind me of my wartime school meals in Sheffield together with pearl barley in stews, which I still cannot eat 80 years on. But at least we didn’t have food banks, even in those poverty-ridden days.
Trevor Marshall
Trimingham, Norfolk
The affordance theory of gender disparity in domestic labour (Report, 22 December) ignores a more fundamental truth discovered by my son around 1990 from his experiences of shared student houses. It was simply that everyone living in a house is certain that they do more washing up than anyone else living there.
Juliet Cairns
Blackheath, London
That philosophers have come up with an “affordance theory” to explain why women clean and men don’t notice is yet another example of philosophers proving to be surplus to society’s requirements.
Keith Barnes
Frome, Somerset
After a miserable weekend with man flu, I was delighted to see the swift return of brief letters to raise my spirits, after last week’s two-day hiatus. I hope to be back doing the household chores by midweek while my wife sorts out an ongoing issue with our bilge pump.
Ian Grieve
Gordon Bennett, Llangollen canal