22 APRIL 2006, Page 30

Conversion tip

From Tom Allen

Sir: Michael Vestey might well be right to question whether the BBC has abolished the mile in favour of the kilometre (Arts, 15 April), but his maths is a little shaky.

I can live with his interesting rule-ofthumb conversion method (although I prefer to halve the kilometres and then add a quarter of the halved figure). My method gives a kilometre value equal to 0.625 of a mile, whereas the true value is around 0.6214.

Tom Allen

West Byfleet, Surrey