ON BBC Teletext – viewers’ letters – there was a variety of opinions about soldiers taking part in parades after coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

No blame can be attached to the soldiers who do what they are told – as they do when they go off to war in a faraway land.

I read somewhere that several thousand Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting and aid agencies are warning that many more will die as a result of a large increase in Nato forces – primarily, as usual, American and British military.

These young men must be delighted to be home and they don’t organise these parades themselves, but I feel there is something distasteful about the element of triumphalism at the proceedings when we all know we are occupiers in a strange land and our young men are dying not for our freedom, but for some obscure and misguided foreign policy devised by out-of-touch politicians both here and in the US.

Hugh Pender, Darlington.

MUSIC BLIGHT AM I the only person who cannot stand it any longer?

Music played everywhere – shops, most supermarkets, banks and building societies (nice when you are trying to sort out finances) and – beyond belief – doctors’ surgeries and Dr Piper House, Darlington’s walk-in health centre. Why? I went to Dr Piper House the other day just after a severe migraine attack. I had to wait outside as a young Michael Jackson was screaching out.

I am not an old fuddy-duddy. I play loud music in my car and keep it to myself, thanks, without the need to inflict it on other people.

Please, is there anybody out there who shares my frustration?

Catherine Davison, Darlington.