Readers respond to an article by Gaby Hinsliff on declining employment opportunities for young graduates

The university degree was never a guaranteed ticket to a good career. I graduated from Cambridge about the same time as Gaby Hinsliff ( We told young people that degrees were their ticket to a better life. It’s become a great betrayal, 13 May ). Without middle-class connections, or “professional” work experience, I returned home after graduation to a neighbourhood counted among the 1% most deprived in England, in a post-industrial northern city with a crumbling social infrastructure. I had £30 to my name and took a job worse than the one I’d had while at school in order to live.

To get to London, where there was a greater range of jobs, I did non-graduate work for a few years, sofa-surfing to begin with. Like today’s graduates, I had to do further study to get a decent job, and I was just shy of 40 when I managed to get a career job. I guess it is a better life in the end, as the alternative may well have been a cycle of bad jobs and unemployment.

Dr Helen Pankhurst says the large-scale reduction in international aid will ultimately impact the government’s own agenda for peace and growth. Plus a letter from Trevor Bonner

This government is on course to go down in history as one of the worst for women and girls ( Labour to defend aid cuts, claiming UK’s days as ‘a global charity’ are over, 13 May ). We already know that the aid cuts will be deadly, but wiping out all funding to programmes that support women and girls is a new low – even if the government is saying the budget for women and girls will be “ mainstreamed ” or folded into other programmes.

Specific programmes help girls into education, help mothers deliver babies safely, and protect women from violence. While some governments are stepping back from supporting women, I never imagined the UK would follow suit. It’s not only catastrophic in the short term for women who will have life-saving support withdrawn but a shortsighted measure that will ultimately work against the government’s own peace, security and growth agenda.

Jane O’Regan writes that the happiest part of her day is when a care visitor arrives to help her husband. Plus, a letter from Jonathan Erskine

Thank you, Zoe Williams (‘Cheap foreign labour’ – this is how Keir Starmer denigrates the migrant carers looking after your loved ones, 12 May ). My husband suffered a severe stroke 14 years ago. Every day since, a care worker has visited us to get him up and wash and dress him. We live in east London and every single care worker we have met has been born abroad. They are kind, supportive and reliable. The happiest moment of my day is when I hear them turn the key in our front door. How dare you suggest that we risk becoming an “island of strangers” because of them, Keir Starmer? I have voted Labour for 60 years. No more.
Jane O’Regan
London

• As a trustee of a charity that employs people to help older citizens remain independent, active and fulfilled in life, I know that care work is demanding and highly skilled. Some of our staff may not have higher education qualifications (although many do), but they are all well trained, empathetic and dedicated to their work. Yvette Cooper should spend a week doing some care work shifts, or simply ask our clients about the service they receive, and then tell us whether the job is “ low-skilled ”.
Jonathan Erskine
Trustee, LifeCare Edinburgh

Scammers’ souls | Peter Sullivan | ‘The enemy within’ | Strangers to whom? | State ownership of newspapers

Years ago I decided to interrupt cold callers ( Letters, 11 May ) and say: “Just a minute. Let us pray. O heavenly Father, who sees into our hearts. You will know when we are involved in an activity whereby we are trying to dupe an elderly lady out of all of her savings. In the light of this, I know that when I die I will be condemned to hell for an eternity. Amen.” I would then quietly put down the receiver. (One repeated “Amen” after me.) It has worked. I no longer get cold calls.
Lesley Matthews
Shipley, West Yorkshire

• The story of the miscarriage of justice that wrongly imprisoned Peter Sullivan for 38 years is difficult to grasp ( Peter Sullivan has murder conviction quashed after 38 years in jail, 13 May ). The court sketch of Peter by Julia Quenzler did more to convey the tragedy of his story than anything I’ve read. A testimony to her empathy and skill.
Simon Rew
London

As avian numbers plunge, activists demand action to save birds from crashing into high-rise blocks

The wren’s legs were tucked delicately underneath its diminutive body, slumped on its side as if asleep. If it wasn’t lying on the bare concrete of a Texas street, there would be few clues that it had endured a crunching, violent death.

The bird had flown headfirst into the Bank of America building, a 72-storey modernist skyscraper in the heart of Dallas. Its corpse was catalogued by volunteers who seek to document the toll of birds that strike the glass, metal and concrete structures festooned with bewildering lights that form the skylines of our cities.

It matters less where civil servants work than who they work for – and that is one of the most centralised governments of any western democracy

The government has announced an army of civil servants , thousands strong, is to head into the darkest provinces. White papers in future will have the tang of JB Priestley and farm subsidies the fizz of Jilly Cooper. Yes Minister ’s Sir Humphrey Appleby will be a Master of Foxhounds. Like all Sir Keir Starmer’s actions just now, it should be worth a few votes.

First, there is nothing new in the plan. Every government makes these token gestures of bureaucratic dispersal. Starmer is merely scaling back Rishi Sunak’s plan as chancellor in 2020, when he proposed moving 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030. He even proposed that 400 of his own Treasury staff would move to Darlington, where a “hub” would be built to console them. They were parodied as exiles to some distant corner of empire, wondering what they had done wrong.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

We find out if this fitness supplement can be used to build muscle mass, decrease fatigue and improve mental health

Creatine has long been popular among athletes. Olympians tout it , fitness influencers experiment with it , and Patrick Schwarzenegger’s gym bro character in The White Lotus added it to his famous shake .

It’s primarily considered a fitness supplement, but doctors are increasingly curious about its potential longevity and mental health benefits.

The election of the new pope has put cassocks back in the spotlight, chiming with fashion’s reverence for all things religious

All eyes have been on the Vatican; the chimney, the smoke, the men who would be pope, the man who now is pope and, among it all, the clothes. It might seem shallow to focus on the vestments, but then the pomp, spectacle – and the ceremonial outfits – are all part of the momentous event.

The election of the new pope also chimes with a mood in fashion, since religious references – ranging from ornate crucifixes and the sacred heart symbol to prayer beads – have been percolating since well before the conclave. Take the hoodies and skirts of the New York label Who Decides War, which are decorated with stained-glass window designs. Or T-shirts from the most recent collection of skatewear brand Palace , adorned with the face of the Virgin Mary.

Benjamin Appl/James Baillieu
(Alpha)
The great baritone’s final student emulates his late mentor’s attention to verbal and musical detail in a 32-song centenary homage featuring plenty of Schubert

No lieder singer of the second half of the last century has cast a longer shadow on subsequent generations than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . Even singers who never studied with the great baritone acknowledge his influence, but for Benjamin Appl the link was much more direct: after attending a masterclass that Fischer-Dieskau gave in Austria in 2009, Appl became Fischer-Dieskau’s final pupil , working with him up to his death three years later.

The centenary tribute that Appl has put together to his teacher with pianist James Baillieu is thoughtful and handsomely produced. The disc of 32 songs is well chosen to reflect every stage in Fischer-Dieskau’s life, from his childhood, through his years as a soldier and prisoner of war during the second world war, the steady upward curve of his career through the 1950s and 60s, to the eminence of his later years. . Packaged within a lavishly illustrated hardback book, it also includes some of the works that were composed specially for him. Schubert is predictably well represented in the sequence, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf unexpectedly rather less so, and Richard Strauss not all, though there are songs by Eisler and Bruno Walter, and by Fischer-Dieskau’s father Albert and brother Klaus. Without ever aping his famous mentor, Appl’s performances have the same attention to detail, both verbal and musical, though his tone sometimes takes on a hard, rather acid edge; it’s a worthy, heartfelt tribute and Fischer-Dieskau’s legions of fans won’t hesitate.