No doubt about it – tiny minds make tiny lives – and the evidence is there for all to see in recent letters to our newspapers. Sukha Singh and Rajeev Sharma thoroughly deserve the roasting dished out by Tai Smith of Nasinu (FT 7/1).

It is difficult to even try to understand the motivation behind the thinking of the likes of Sharma and Singh. Such meanness of spirit, paucity of generosity, lack of tolerance. Have you two never had a dream? Have you never ever wanted to do something simply for the fun of it? To do something to lift your spirits with joy?

We have no idea how Talei Burness managed to pay for her sky-dive and we have no right whatsoever to criticise her right or means to do so. For all we know she may have been stashing away $1 a week for years! Other people spend many times that in a week on grog or lottery tickets or any number of other fruitless pastimes.

Here we have a lady (a true lady, this writer can vouch for that) who on her 70^th birthday fulfilled a dream: at the same time doing every pensioner world wide an enormous favour. She showed the rest of us what we are made of. She showed us what we can do if we put our minds to it.

Talei Burness jumped out of a plane at 4,000ft and in free-fall yelled ‘One for the pensioners!’ showing us all that, wrinkles, cellulite, grey hair and creaking bones do not mean that we are over the hill, finished, ex, no more, done for, irrelevant and useless.

Talei Burness is a 70 year old lady with guts and grit. Shame on you Singh and Sharma. Jealous, are you? Envious? Please just take your tiny minds and crawl back into the holes where you belong.