Reader correspondence, selected and printed unedited except for length, at Maya Hartley's own insistence that the difficult ones run alongside the kind ones. November to March.

I have read every one of your pieces on this since October and I want to say thank you for treating your readers like adults. Every other outlet I've tried either tells me it's obviously nothing or obviously everything. You are the only one who has told me plainly what you don't yet know. That is worth more to me than a confident wrong answer. — reader, Polegate

You call yourself a journalist but you won't say what he is. That is the only question that matters and you keep dodging it. Either say what he is or admit you don't have the courage to. — reader, name withheld

My daughter was one of the people flagged by whatever this Chorus system is. I won't say more than that because I'm frightened of what saying more might cost her, which I recognise is itself the whole story you've been trying to tell. I don't have anything useful to add except that it is real, and it happened to an ordinary family, and nobody has ever explained why. — reader, West Yorkshire

I run a small business two doors from where the "Groundline" office used to have its window smashed in January (I understand it wasn't reported, and I understand why). I want you to know some of us noticed, and some of us are glad you kept publishing anyway. — reader, Eastbourne

You published a line a few weeks ago about asking where the people blaming your community for its problems keep their own money. I have thought about that sentence more than anything else I've read this year. I don't know what to do with it yet. I wanted you to know it landed somewhere. — reader, Sunderland

I am a serving officer and cannot give my name. I want to say only that your reporting on the Border Force officer's report matched, in every particular I am able to confirm, what I understand happened. I am sorry that is the only sentence I am able to safely offer you. — reader, unattributable

Cancel my subscription. This is exactly the kind of sensationalised nonsense that gives real journalism a bad name. — reader, Hastings

[Editor's note: printed as received, alongside the above, because Maya asked that we run the good and the furious side by side, without comment, and let readers draw their own conclusions about which was which.]

I am the woman at number twelve who used to leave a mince pie out every December for a postman I never once opened the door to thank properly. I read, weeks ago, that he'd been held eleven days over something to do with all this and released without a word of explanation. I don't know if he'll ever read this. I wanted it printed anyway. I am sorry. I should have opened the door years ago and said so to his face instead of leaving it on a step. — reader, name withheld at her own request

My son is the age your teenager in Leeds was when her bedroom got searched. I have not let him attend a single demonstration since I read that piece, not because I think it's likely to happen to him, but because I have realised I no longer know what "likely" means in a world where an algorithm can do that on the strength of forty minutes and a coincidence. I don't know whether that makes me a sensible parent or a frightened one. Possibly both. — reader, Bradford