During the week of the Nazi Gold Conference, where the Vatican was accused of having laundered gold looted from the 28,000 Gypsy victims of Croatia’s Ustashe Nazi puppet regime, you report on a heated academic debate concerning a tragedy that occurred 82 years ago in Turkey (“Israelis torn over Armenian ‘holocaust’”, 7 December) Victims have long memories – and rightly so. As for the Ustashe’s Second World War victims, these also included Jews but the vast majority were Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia. It is also impossible to sell all the seats for opera here – even for Puccini on a Saturday night. Yes, you can buy houses very cheaply, but you cannot sell them again because no one wants to move here.

Plenty of people wish to move out.
I cannot wait to move south again and am prepared to spend quite a bit of money to do so because I want to be in a place that is alive; that has sophisticated audiences in its theatres and at its concerts; that is within easy reach of London and Oxford; that has a good choice of coffee and lunch places at its centre, and where there is an abundance of people to invite for the kind oflunch that Pepinster describes. I want to be in a place that is pro-active rather than reactive and that energises rather than drains me. Contrary to Catherine Pepinster’s generalisations, even though I am from the South, I do think of the North as a place “where people might lunch as [she] did or converse intelligently”. For all these reasons I shall be leaving Sheffield.Carol SmithSheffield.

I get cross at the stereotypical picture of the single parent.For the vast majority of lone parents it is not a choice. Poor didn’t bother me too much because there are a lot of single parents out there that are poor, but we are not socially inadequate! My children are not socially inadequate! Faye is very sporty, she also likes geography and the humanities, that’s what she wants to do Mark is very inquiring, he wants to be a scientist They both love computers Mark’s a keen runner, and they both do karate I ferry them round to everything. Yes, you can “attend the theatre [and] listen to fine music” in Sheffield, but this is a city that turns over its excellent Crucible Theatre to snooker for a considerable period. I have done so in Sheffield, but usually with people who, like myself, were not born and bred here. He did so out of a recognition that once capitalism had passed its early dynamic phase it would throw up constraints on human development. Modern thinkers who adopt Marx do so because they want to understand the dynamics of capitalist society and that is generally where their interest ends. In this age of low horizons, radical social change brought about by conscious action is off the agenda, and in this climate Marx can seem unthreatening.

However, Marx wasn’t interested in just understanding society, in his words “the point is to change it”

David Amis
Stanford le Hope, Essex. Sheffield may not be a dead-end town any more but it is certainly lacking in imagination, initiative or interest (“Sheffield’s really a post-industrial paradise”, Section 2, 7 December). John Cassidy’s redefinition of Marx as a “student of capitalism” is wide of the mark (“The next big thinker”, Review, 7 December) Marx didn’t write Capital to satisfy intellectual curiosity. We’ve been able to share the gripes and complaints – and the pride. We’ve all been through the same and we can say, “Yes, I know exactly how you’re feeling”. It angers me that there is this stereotype that we are the kind of people who don’t want a job, aren’t interested in getting a job, don’t want to move forward, don’t want our children to achieve. All the single parents I know, whether it’s through school or work or just socially, they are all doing all that – they and their children are doing incredibly well.

It might not ring true because of the vision people have, but a lot of us out there are managing.I know that a lot of questions about how successful I’m being as a parent won’t be answered until the children are adults themselves and have children of their own, and can reflect on it all themselves But I’m not unique, my children are not unique We are just getting on and making the best of it.. I think positively: when they leave the nest it will be my time for myself, the time I don’t have now.A number of my close work colleagues have been in the same situation. Faye and Mark are close and supportive of each other, and close to their grandparents. I think we have all grown in tolerance and acceptance.I keep promising myself that I will never make the children feel guilty even if I’m on my own when they leave home, because they have to have their own lives when the time comes. Any parent would, but I’m conscious of the fact that there is just me I have to be a lot more amenable, approachable. Being a parent is a learning curve, it’s constant, and as the years have gone on I’ve gained more confidence that I can be both parents. When I last went in to Faye’s school for parents’ evening, her head of year said she’d be one of the school’s achievers.