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Photo spreads are great for gift wrap

<span>Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

I save the central pages of the Guardian when they are particularly attractive and use them to wrap gifts (Letters, 27 November), suiting the theme to the contents or the recipient. Friday’s Maradona Eyewitness photos would be great for a football-mad nephew. To wrap small presents, I’ve been keeping interesting cuttings that I hope will amuse my friends and that they can then put in their recycling bins. Down with glitter and glossy paper!
Barbara Foster
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire

• A tripartite twinning between Condom in France, Hell in Norway and Fucking in Austria might have created solidarity in adversity and obviated the need for a name change – but good to know that Petting in Germany is still OK (Fugging hell: tired of mockery, Austrian village changes name, 26 November).
Paul Tattam
Chinley, Derbyshire

• I’m fed up with your blind dates not hitting it off (Blind date: ‘I thought she looked like Emma Watson’, 28 November). I want to see some sentimental romance to cheer my lockdown days. I have in the past offered myself for a blind date, but wasn’t taken up – am I too old at 81?
Jude McGowan
London

• Not content with averaging over 16 ingredients in the first seven recipes in Feast (28 November), the chefs include makrut lime leaves, Szechuan peppercorns, portobello mushrooms, ’nduja, galangal paste and cassia bark. Is this a competition?
Barbara McDowell
Ludlow, Shropshire

• When I gave blood in East Germany in the mid-1970s, donors were not only paid but fed a meal of sausage on rye bread (Letters, 27 November). But the highlight was that on one occasion the donor on the next bed was called Karl Marx.
Janet Fraser
Twickenham, London