Readers have expressed sympathy for Lucy Mangan after she sliced her thumb while using a mandolin to make potatoes dauphinoise. In a letter to the Guardian, Joel Donovan from London shared his own experience of mandolining off his thumb tip and waiting in an A&E queue alongside another man who had done the same. Donovan noted that the other man had brought his severed thumb tip in a shopping bag on ice, while his wife later mistook a shred of spring onion for his missing thumb tip.
Ian Simmons from Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, also offered his sympathies, revealing that after several bloody fingertip-shaving incidents, he now only uses a mandolin while wearing a butcher's chain-mail glove on the active hand. The letters highlight the frequency of such injuries and their potential burden on the NHS.
