A chorus of approval for Phil Walker, a reader from Salisbury, who last week accused The Times of London-centricity. For those of you who had better things to do than read Feedback last weekend, my response was broadly that we simply cannot ignore the twin facts that most stories and cultural events of national significance originate in the capital, and that a third of our readers are concentrated in Greater London; I added that I wouldn’t expect a new show at my local Tunbridge Wells theatre to be given space ahead of what’s opening at the National. That left some of you pretty unconvinced. I promise to pass on your sentiments to the Editor, and can at least give a few more of you an airing here.

Olive Lewenz writes: “Phil Walker put our case beautifully. My mother-in-law lives in Tunbridge Wells and I am therefore well acquainted with the superb communication links with London. I would place Tunbridge Wells’s Assembly Hall on a par with the Guild Hall or the Playhouse Theatre in Preston, where I live. I do not necessarily need to see these in Playlist, but I do expect cultural attractions in our largest cities to be promoted far more. You have the option of an evening’s entertainment in London. I live 35 miles from Manchester and Liverpool and I would like to see the cultural options available to me.”

Mark Dickin e-mails from Stratford-upon-Avon: “Your drive for increased readership is not concentrated on the South East and London. Surely then, it makes sense to increase the volume of provincial articles and content. This can be achieved without detracting from the great metropolitan read that we all love. Exposure for regional stories and contents must surely appeal to new readers.”

Marion Moverley is in “rural North Yorkshire”: “I read The Times because it gives me information about the whole of the British Isles and gives excellent coverage of world events. However, one area where you are unashamedly London-centric is in Giles Coren’s restaurant reviews. Although I admire Giles for his witty writing, if I were to visit Newcastle or Edinburgh I would like to know where or where not to eat.”

Dave Morris, whereabouts unknown, says: “I am amazed at your sheer arrogance! I was annoyed because I had just been looking at your Saturday Offers page. Perhaps this should be retitled Saturday Offers for Londoners. There is an offer for Kew Gardens and one for the Albert Hall, but neither of these is possible for people in other parts of the country to take up without great expense. You say ‘most stories and cultural events of significance originate in London’. What a load of rubbish! This just goes to show how little you Londoners know about the real country. Must go now. I need to drag my woman into our cave to clean it up.” (Can I just point out that the third of the three Saturday offers was for Bestival in Dorset, by way of balance?) Finally, Norman Hall-Gardiner writes from Cumbria: “Firstly, two thirds of your readers do not live in Greater London. You could argue that to give fair coverage to all of the population would require a publication hundreds of pages long. That misses the point. The important thing to the unrepresented two thirds is not where in the country the spotlight falls, but that it isn’t London. Secondly, isn’t a full theatre in Tunbridge Wells of equal value to a full National Theatre? I detect more than perceived geographical imperatives; I also detect cultural snobbery. The provinces are fine for second homes, for nuclear power stations, for factories, farms and forests. Let’s not give the locals ideas above their station.”

World view

A clutch of own goals this week, most visibly on the front cover of Tuesday’s Climate Challenge supplement published to mark the Nobel Laureate Symposium at St James’s Palace. The cover image of the Earth from space was inexplicably shown back to front, placing Madagascar to the west of Africa, leading one or two generous readers — thank you, Colin Davey and James Waddell — to wonder if this was deliberately symbolic of the topsy-turvy world we have created. No, it was just an error, I’m afraid. (Jake Luscombe, who broke off from his geography GCSE revision on climate change to point it out, gave us no quarter at all. He’ll go far.) We’re still trying to work out who should be shot; all of us, probably. This produced a mere trickle of complaints, however, compared with the torrent that engulfed Feedback Towers after a misprint in Wednesday’s Polygon puzzle (the central letter should have been L, not I; our apologies), with many of you asking if, given that the letters were supposed to spell FALLIBLE, we were merely trying to prove a point. I can’t help feeling that this reveals something about Times readers, although I haven’t decided what. And to save time I’ll simply shoot myself for saying last week that Derby is the county town of Derbyshire; several readers have gently informed me that Matlock has that distinction (and me a Bakewell girl. Girl. No jokes about tarts, thank you, or even puddings).

Better by degrees

Conversion error of the week (I’m going to keep this up until either we start getting them right or I start losing the will to live, whichever happens sooner): “The global warming of less than 1C (34F) that the world has experienced . . .” No, no, no. It’s a temperature change, not a temperature. A change of 1 degree celsius equates to a change of 1.8 degrees fahrenheit. Even I can fathom this one. Must try harder.