IT WAS the party of the century. No doubt about that, but how many of the revellers who cheered in 2000 at the Old Steine, Brighton, realise they owe a thank-you to the St John Ambulance?

I ask because Terry Wing, Divisional Superintendent for Regency Division, reckons his team had too scant a mention in our reports.

Acknowledging parts others played, he reminds me that without the 82 volunteers of the St John Ambulance and the Red Cross the event could not have happened.

"All too often we forget the vital volunteer services," he says. "Overpaid pop and sports personalities were awarded New Year honours, but none to the unpaid volunteers from our organisation."

Terry says it was hard getting so many volunteers and I'm sure we all join him in thanking them for their dedication. They handled 140 casualties. Some were so drunk they didn't know who they were, but that didn't stop them throwing up everywhere. As Terry puts it: 'We will always remember what we were doing on the stroke of midnight - ducking vomit!'

And his most memorable millennium moment? Attending on the spot to a man who fell out of a tree into soaked bushes being used as a toilet by a constant stream of people.

So if you had a smashing time in the Steine, don't forget Terry's teams next time you see them rattling collecting tins.

A letter on our Opinion page a while ago upset everyone at Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre, secretary Tony Greenstein tells me. Sylvie Mitchell complained that toys she had offered had not been collected.

Tony said no one could recall taking phone calls from her. There was nothing in their message book and he thought perhaps she had rung the town's other unemployed centre.

He wants me to make it clear they collect all toys offered for the Christmas Party. As Tony said, the 50-plus volunteers who put in so much work sometimes wonder if it is all worthwhile when they receive brickbats in return.

Our Bygone Brighton supplement last Friday was a splendid finale to a year of millennium extras. Twenty centuries of the great and good, mad and bad.

However, it caused a flurry with Paul Rooth, from Portslade. He took exception to the piece about Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese twins born in Brighton in 1908. His father, Dr James Augustus Rooth, had delivered them.

Paul says it was rubbish to say his father had called the birth easy, since the midwife had sent for him.

Sorry, Paul, that came from our own files. Again and again in those yellowed cuttings there's that quote from your dad saying it was an easy birth. In the same clippings his address is given as Old Shoreham Road even though you say he lived in Goldsmid Road.

This is not the first time Paul has complained to the Argus. He wrote 30 years ago - and is still waiting for a reply, he says. Sorry about that, too. He wanted to know how we were able in 1969 to carry his father's comments about the twins when he had died six years earlier. I think I've found the right cutting and it doesn't make it clear the remarks had been made years earlier. I hope the record is now straight, Paul, and this makes up for the letter you should have had in the Sixties.

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