As a festive excursion last Christmas this column unveiled some of the treasures of the Times Archive, which is housed in a temperature-controlled warehouse here at Wapping and guarded tenaciously by the chief archivist, Eamon Dyas.

Plans were then afoot to make the newspaper contents of the archive available online, and those plans have now come to fruition, as some of you, prompted by this week's features in times2, have discovered.

Linda Dawe wrote from Chesham: “Having suffered for a couple of weeks since your relaunch, I had given up - the shock of no more Frieda Hughes every Monday is just too painful. But now a new possibility opens - the Times Archive online means that I can go the full Miss Havisham, shut myself away from daylight with my PC and work my way back to 1785. Don't bother to print this - I'll never see it; already I fade into the past...”

Gary Rawlinson, from Marlborough, has been equally self-indulgent: “What a fantastic resource the new Times Archive is. Now I can show my children the letters on the state of the economy that I wrote to you in the late 1970s. Hopefully the archive will soon be extended to the present day, when I will then be able to do the same with letters about taking young children to K2 and the dangers of runners' sports bags on the Tube.”

Gosh, did we really print those?

You can access 200 years of The Times - every issue published from 1785 to 1985 (and we're working on making the more recent issues available too) in its original printed form. That's more than seven million articles, and there's an introductory free access period, so jump in quick at timesonline.co.uk/archive.

With or without?

Prepositions continue to vex you, whether too many (meet with, lose out) or too few (out the window). Barry Hyman, who opines that in the former case they are more properly postpositions, deplores the use of back, as in “back in 1900. That's to help us know it's not in the future, is it?” In the latter category, Colin Rose and Diana Ellis both dislike the creeping spread of “appeal a decision”; Mr Rose points out that one can appeal both for and against, “so you appeal for an lbw decision, and the batsman would sometimes like to appeal against the decision. Please bring back our prepositions.”

Unin-spiral

John Campbell wrote from Beccles at the start of the week to defend, of all things, the spiral: “I am saddened by the universal mistreatment of the spiral. No disaster or untoward event can unfold without its spiralling out of control, which is unreasonable and unjustifiable. Perhaps this cliché can now be retired.” I think we can take it, then, that Wednesday's splash headline did nothing to improve his mood: “New strikes era looms as cost of living spirals”.

Clive Whitbourn - whose work in the chemical industry has already exposed him to a new plural, gasses - accuses us of now inventing another one, busses: “Do we now double the s to prevent the word from rhyming with abuses?” Actually, and slightly to my own surprise, my Chambers Dictionary allows both versions.

But Eric Monahan has a point about another recent report: “Sloths ‘descend from the trees to go to the loo'? How euphemistic can you get? This conjures up a picture of a jungle with a urinal and lavatory bowl at the foot of every tree. Please treat your readers as adults.”

Anne Finnis objects to our preference for a swath rather than a swathe (of prepositions, perhaps): “Dictionaries I have consulted give both spellings but the pronunciation differs significantly. One hears the word from time to time on TV or radio, but always pronounced to rhyme with ‘bathe'. But without the e it would rhyme with ‘moth'.” I agree it is one of the quirkier preferences of our style bible.

And off to the tower with us for referring (in TheKnowledge) to the Queen as HRH instead of HM. Sorry, ma'am.

Hide and seek

John Theaker is pleased with his revamped paper - “I just wanted somebody in The Times to know

how marvellous it is that the two halves of the paper at last meet in the middle (more or less). Congratulations. Contentswise the improvements are most gratifying.” I'm relieved to say that weekday complaints about poor printing, off-centre folding or times2 missing have dropped off since we switched to the new presses at Broxbourne, although there are clearly still some Saturday copies going out without a full complement of supplements, for which we apologise.

However, now James Cane can't find the motoring column since the revamp - it's in times2 on Mondays, written by our sports columnist Giles Smith; Roger Forder can't find the winning lottery numbers - they go at the foot of the first column of news briefs, which is usually on page 4, on Mondays and Thursdays; some of you still can't find Derwent May's Nature Notes, which are on the new Daily Universal Register page in the Opinion section; and Brenda Lee, of Cardiff, can't find the great Richard Morrison, which will never do.

She fears he has been dispatched to Siberia - only if there's the prospect of a freebie to some recherché cultural festival, Mrs Lee. Mr M still writes his times2 column on Wednesdays (although he was on holiday last week), his Knowledge column on Saturdays, and music reviews pretty much any day - he's hard to miss.

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