Alan Edge longs for the return of a sadly-missed Anfield tradition

BITING WINDS and unanswered questions lashed the island of Iona in equal measure yesterday as the community buried the first of last week's boating accident victims.

In Francesca Zambello's Boris Godunov at ENO, Russia's past is its present.

A fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs answers Christine Hardyment's essay on the family

The chairman of Hector Russell, a kilt-making firm, replies to Philip Hensher

COUNT DRACULA wasn't a vampire - he had rabies, according to a Spanish doctor who says ancient European legends about the blood-drinking undead were actually descriptions of people with the illness.

Dramatic and brooding, Tintagel is set on one of the wildest and most savagely romantic coastlines in Britain. The legendary birthplace of King Arthur is saturated in folklore ... gift shops, hordes of visitors and piles of plastic Excaliber swords. What, asks Liverpool poet Brian Patten, would Merlin and the original Knights of the Round Table make of it all if they were around today?

THE Bishop of Norwich worries "that we are in grave danger of losing ... the concept of learning prayer by heart" (report, 12 February).

Terry Callier

In the era of the X Files, conspiracy theories and urban myths abound. But the Internet has taken this paranoia to previously unscaled heights

Last night, in the apt surroundings of the Law Society, Ian Rankin won the coveted Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers Association for his ninth Inspector Rebus mystery, Black & Blue. Now here's one judging panel that knows how to please its patrons. "The aroma of the whisky was fine," muses Rankin's bibulous Edinburgh detective in a typical bar-propping moment, "smoky, filling nostrils and lungs." The CWA awards are sponsored by The Macallan.

Caroline Allen explores the mythological roots of trees.

William Tell Ustinov Studio, Bath

When people learn that my stepfather, John Wellings-Longmore (1917- 1982), was a West African, they jump to several false conclusions. They imagine that he must have sparked my great interest in African and West Indian folklore. Not so. My mother remarried in 1953, when I was eleven and my brother Martin ten. At the time, marriages between white and black people in England were rare. My passion for folklore had been stimulated by my mother's interest in the subject: it began when I was four - at most.