Readers' letters: Houses built in place of happy memories

Recently in Edinburgh, I decided to take a drive to places I know and remember. One of these is Turnhouse Road, that goes from the Maybury to what is now the Cargo Terminal at the airport.

Housebuilding has taken over previously quiet Edinburgh landscapes

That road was – decades ago – the start of the old A9 to Linlithgow. Before the new airport runway was built, traffic would be stopped when aircraft were taking off on the old runway, across the road, and heading westwards over Carlowrie Castle.

To my amazement everything to the right and left of Turnhouse Road has been demolished for a huge private housing development. Meadowfield Farm and its buildings and cottages all gone. The land up to the stone bridge over the railway line where, as a schoolboy of the 1950s, I would sit and watch the Turnhouse aircraft, now all flattened and ready for houses. To the right, everything gone, from the small industrial estate up to the golf course, leaving the formerly pleasantly isolated row of cottages at the bottom of Craigs Road to be leant on by new housing called West Craigs. And then, at the Barnton end of Maybury Road, another huge development, backing towards Cammo Grove. Two huge pieces of quiet Edinburgh landscape gone.

As always, I wonder where all the people to buy these houses will come from. But even more importantly, how will the already inadequate and potholed roads into Edinburgh begin to cope with these extra hundreds of two-car families, so inconveniently placed on the outskirts of a once beautiful city?

Malcolm Parkin, Kinnesswood, Kinross

Pronoun problem

The SNP administration has an obsession with sex and identity. Primary pupils are to be taught how to use ‘inclusive’ pronouns, which particularly means using ‘they’ instead of ‘he' or ‘she’, which is grammatically wrong.

I thought that primary schooling was a time when pupils were given a grounding in the essentials of education, especially the indispensable building blocks of literacy and numeracy, without which other subjects are inaccessible. Now, the very young are to have school time consumed by a ‘positive introduction to identity, gender and sexual orientation’.

If this is because bullying is a problem, then bullying should be rooted out. But the sexualisation of children and the imposition on them of certain fashionable ideologies deprives them of their carefree childhood and introduces state-enforced indoctrination in matters that have traditionally been regarded as being in the realm of the family.

Jill Stephenson, Ednburgh

Glass act

The council should be thinking about putting a glass building around the Scott Monument. It would be a good tourist attraction and would bring in a lot of cash for the council funds.

It would have restuarants and bars on six floors and have elevators to all floors. it would also pay for restoring the crumbling building to its former glory. Let’s do it.

James E Fraser, Edinburgh

Delta variant

A friend of mine currently has a headache and a sore throat, which have been shown by a wide-ranging UK study to be possible symptoms of the virulent Delta variant of coronavirus. However, NHS Inform Scotland advise that you should only immediately isolate and arrange a PCR test if you have a fever, new cough or change to taste or smell.

In fact, headache and a sore throat have been shown to be more common symptoms of the Delta variant than the latter three. No wonder it is so rampant.

David J Mackay, Edinburgh