LOOKS like we jumped the gun on a Government notion councillors might take on new executive roles. We muddled up names in a caption last week about a new cycle path in Burgess Hill and merged Ken Blanshard, leader of Mid Sussex District Council, with his chief executive Bill Hatton to create a new chap altogether called Ken Hatton.

Mr Blanshard says he rather enjoyed our Freudian slip but wants everyone to know he has not merged with Bill and pledges if it were to happen, it would only take place after the widest possible consultation. Sorry for our error, gentlemen. An amusing notion, nevertheless, that perhaps lends itself to a bit of wicked speculation during dull moments at council meetings all over Sussex. Suppose we took Jim and merged him with Mike . . . Hmm!

I'm obliged to my old friend Gerald Spicer from Portslade for putting us straight about WAAFs. Last Saturday my fellow columnist Vanora Leigh wrote that her mother started smoking during the war when she was in uniform. Unfortunately someone here changed WAAF to WRAF and Gerald, an RAF veteran himself, opened up with typewriter blazing.

No, he groans, she would have been in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. As he took pains to point out, the WRAF existed from 1918 until June 28, 1939, when it became the WAAF. After the war, in 1949, the name changed back to the WRAF. Then in the liberated days of 1993 it was RAF for everyone and the women's section became history.

An understandable mistake but Vanora's mum was miffed, too. She's jolly proud of having been a WAAF and has kept her wings as a memento of those days.

Graham Taylor from Brighton reckons we've got a joker in our pack who thought it a jolly wheeze to put an August 1999 dateline on a page last Wednesday. No, it wasn't someone thinking of their hols, just a lack of attention. As I've said before, many Argus pages are built up from skeleton copies we park in the computer. Arbitrary datelines are in place on these master pages but need changing to the correct day. We just forgot.

Writing about Sussex's new £200 million power station at Shoreham Harbour we were wide of the mark with a couple of details about the old power station.

Amistake in a press release led us to say the old Brighton B station closed in 1975. I was alerted to the error by W Fuller from Hove, who used to work there. Brighton B stopped generating in March, 1987, he tells me.

Nor was Brighton B completed in 1952, he says. Sorry, that was our mistake. We should have said the station was commissioned in 1952.

Following our story about some people being refused a drink at the Swan Inn, Falmer, landlord John Woodruff has asked me to say customers who feel they cannot sign a petition objecting to plans to build Albion's new ground in the village can nevertheless still be sure of getting a beer and a welcome.

The petition is on the bar but there's no compunction to sign, says John. But he says he's had some new customers because of it. Several people who popped in to wield their ballpoints stayed to sample his ale.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.