The world watched as Belle Tout at Beachy Head was inched away from danger and the risk of plunging 285ft on to the beach in the near future. But to our embarrassment we managed to get our before and after pictures in a muddle last Saturday.

As a result, while everyone was applauding a tricky technical feat, we ended up showing the stone tower had apparently been pushed much closer to the brink.

Our silly mistake was spotted by R J Sharpe from Patcham, J C McAvoy from Polegate, e-mailers Howard Bates and Christopher Smith and plenty more of you, judging by the phone calls we had.

Engineers reckon the lighthouse is okay now for about 50 years, and because of the new underlining it could be shunted farther inland if more rock crumbles from the cliffs. You can bet, though, that they won't be letting us direct operations.

WE WERE hostages to fortune when we published a letter on Monday complaining about the misuse of words in modern life.

Not only did we have a printing error in that letter but a word was wrongly used just a column away.

Afilm company wanted to know where to find what it called the New Centurions, the 3,500 or so people who will be celebrating their 100th birthday next year. It wanted to feature them in a TV documentary.

Oops. We should of course have changed centurions to centenarians. A centurion was a commander in the Roman army and I doubt many of them lived to be 100.

ACOUPLE of you rang me after our story on Wednesday about teenager Nicola Fairey using her newly-acquired lifeguard skills to rescue a drowning man from freezing waters.

She was trekking through Snowdonia as part of her Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award when one of her group, a diabetic, began calling for help as he tried to cross a lake.

The struggling man's blood sugar level had fallen and Nicola dived into the water to pull him to safety.

She said he recovered once he had taken his insulin but my callers said he probably took something else, as insulin is in fact used to lower the blood sugar level as part of diabetes treatment.

They would not want readers to get the wrong impression. In all probability, says the British Diabetic Association, it was a shot of glucagon that did the trick.

WE HAD a printing error in Vanora Leigh's Saturday column a couple of weeks ago that will probably end up in another newspaper's regular Funny Ha-Ha column, and we mustn't grumble too much at someone else's wicked delight in our slip-up.

We said the Raystede animal sanctuary near Ringmer has a rose garden where people can have their cremated pets commemorated 'with a rose tree and a plague'.

As my anonymous correspondent said, it sounds like a place his dentist would recommend avoiding like the plaque. We shall obviously have to watch our g's and q's!

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