Sir: Today I have - very reluctantly - put a tick against my name on the electoral registration form because, having reached the age of 70 in July, I am now no longer eligible for jury service.

Sir: Steven Wootton ("Celtic revival makes itself heard far and wide", 26 August) refers to the "Celtic dialect, Kernow".

Back in the 1960s J B Priestley wrote a novel about two unscrupulous PR men who, having been provided with generous funding by a rich widow, set about the business of image-making. Indeed, they go so far as to found a whole university department of social imagistics. They are tremendously successful and the book ends with their producing virtually identical image-crafted party leaders for the Conservative and Labour Parties complete with interchangeable, public-relations-friendly policies. He called his book The Image Men and it was heavily criticised at the time for the sheer implausibility of its plot.

Sir: Science is neutral. It is the unholy alliance of science, technology and money - egged on when it suits it by government - that is threatening the Earth and all life upon it.

Papers seized

A health authority finance executive has been suspended amid claims that he was planning to set up his own company selling private health care, it was revealed last night.

Trawler held

The controversy about the existence of the Beast of Bodmin was revived yesterday by the release of new video footage of a large cat-like creature in a field near Bridgwater, Somerset.

JUSTINE Picardie should count her blessings (Review, 7 May). If she lived in Cornwall she would have paid the price of South West Water's £160m spending in 1994/5 to improve drinking and bathing water and sewage treatments. That money came from our pockets, and this year's projects demand not a paltry £162 but, in our case, a massive £430. And our council tax bill is only £70 lower than hers. That's the price of a "fragrant Cornwall".

Sir: "Huge, burly fishermen in Cornwall" are not "grizzled Anglo-Saxon frontiersmen" (Ismism; "No. 10: reelism", 3 April); they are Celts. Cornwall is a Celtic nation with a distinct identity from neighbouring England.

Hide and seek

A FLYING club instructor and a naval officer died in a light aircraft crash after performing prohibited aerobatics, an accident report said. Colin Shaw, 59, of Trebarvah, Cornwall, and Lieutenant Rob Cuthbert, 34, from RNAS Culdrose, Cornwall, died when the officer's Steen Skybolt went into a spin and crashed into the sea near Penzance, in June.

ONE OF the finest reliquaries in England has been stolen from Bodmin parish church. The priceless fine ivory and gold casket once carried the bones of the patron saint of Cornwall, St Petroc.

MORE than 10,000 people have signed a petition against the closure of the last two coastguard look-out stations in Britain because of fears lives could be lost. The stations, at Gwennap Head, Land's End, and St Ives, Cornwall, will shut at the end of September as part of budget cuts.