Their union should not be a platform for personal malice, or a gravy train. I was elected fairly with a mandate to reform and modernise the union’s antiquated structures, which currently eat up 70p in every £1 of members’ contributions. But, given that tsunamis in the Indian Ocean are not a regular occurrence and roughly 70 times less frequent than for Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, this would have required public education.DAVID NOWELL New Barnet, Hertfordshire Union inquiry Sir: Barrie Clement’s article “GMB leader was ‘elected on a rigged ballot’ ” (20 December) reported that I am facing investigation.I welcome the opportunity to throw open the GMB to scrutiny. I fear that with the current standing of our PM among a large proportion of the UK voters and sections of the media such an act would be regarded with pure cynicism, even if it were well intended. In this situation Tony cannot win, no matter what he does.FRASER YATES IpswichSir: With the benefit of hindsight Jeremy Corbyn MP (letter, 30 December) is right that a tsunami warning via the global media would have been better than nothing.However, such a system would have had to have been set up in advance, given the risk of hoaxes such as the one complete with dummy website which fooled the BBC on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. It makes my financial donation seem so inadequate.I do hope that Ms Street-Porter will do more than slag off Tony Blair, who by holidaying in Egypt is making a fairly substantial donation to the local economy and who I feel pretty sure is as distressed as she about the tsunami disaster.Dr TIM LAWSON Cheam, SurreySir: Janet Street-Porter believes that Tony Blair should return from his luxury holiday in the sun and set an example by leading the mourning from the front.

It didn’t disappoint.But there is still a qualitative difference between having an admiration reinforced and acquiring an entirely novel one – an exhilaration that has nothing to do with relative merits and everything to do with a feeling of refreshed possibilities. Some critics, reading Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission, detected a falling-off from his novel The Impressionist. As I had not read the first book, all I could detect was a seductive argument for doing so at once.In film, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was preceded by a rumble of approbation, but not by the crushing coercive weight of a Hollywood PR campaign. As a result, it was still possible to feel a sense of personal discovery while watching it – something that will be much harder with his next big project, which now has a reputation to maintain I’ll go, naturally Perhaps it won’t let us down. But what I am really looking forward to in 2005 is the stuff I’m not looking forward to at all
More from Thomas Sutcliffe. Many of those from outlying farms could also converse in the tribal languages of their area.

Our school only taught French, Latin and German, but most of us could make ourselves understood far more effectively in the back streets of Mombasa or Nairobi than we could in the suburbs of Paris or Frankfurt. But this was a very unusual instance – and as far as the contract documentation was concerned, the client required that it should all be in English in any case.The fact is that, for major projects, English is the accepted world language and while it would be advantageous to be able to deal with all foreign customers in their own languages it is impracticable and not commercially essential.DENNIS TWIST Clun, ShropshireSir: Stephen Osborn points out that “the priority for the English-speaker is not to learn a language fluently but to develop a technique for learning any language that might be useful” (letter, 29 December). That is surely what people from these islands did throughout the days of empire.As a schoolboy in Kenya during the 1950s I remember it being rare indeed to find a schoolmate who was not fluent (if probably somewhat ungrammatical) in Swahili unless they were of a family that had recently arrived from Home. What languages would we have chosen: Russian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Arabic?In any case, at the levels we were dealing with, almost all our clients spoke English (and our foreign competitors conducted much of their export work in English). I have to admit that it was rather embarrassing when we were in a consortium with two German companies and one Austrian company for a very large project in Russia and all the inter-consortium communications had to be in English because while we couldn’t field a team of German speakers the partners’ staff all spoke good English. British language skills: no German, but fluent Swahili

British language skills: no German, but fluent Swahili
Sir: Recent letters have discussed the knowledge of foreign languages by Britons.I used to be the sales director of a major British firm of process plant contractors which dealt in multi-million pound projects all over the world.