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That little word 'mum' adds so much, don't you think?

You can almost see her in her Marigold gloves and pinny, with a few baby-sick stains down the front, thinking:

"Compared to the 23-hour labour I had with Kylie-Maree, climbing Moroccan sand dunes is a doddle."

That would prompt a letter from 12-year-old Rory Smarm, of Devonport High School for Boys saying: "Contrary to popular belief, most of the Sahara, particularly that in Morocco, is stony hamada (from the Arabic, meaning 'stone desert'). The great sand dunes, or erg, are a rare feature, mainly to be found in Libya and Tunisia in the west and Egypt in the east."

Which would lead to a letter from Bert Proud, aged 84, pointing out, "When I was with a forward recce unit in the Eighth Army in the western desert in 1942, shadowing the [German] Afrika Korps in southern Tunisia, we strayed into Morocco in a desert storm and it was erg all right because I spent the next six months trying to get the sand out of my big end."

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