WHISPERING SMITH: My slimline tonic? It's all thanks to salad days

Having no willpower at all, I joined Laura Goddard’s excellent Littlehampton Weight Watchers group for support in my efforts to lose a few pounds, and in just 15 weeks I have lost two stone.

I put this down, not only to WW encouragement, giving up junk food, sugar and losing my corkscrew, but also to discovering, through WW a wealth of new and tasty food.

Among these are courgettes, much like green sausages, but with a completely different taste, possibly due to the fact there is no meat in them, and watercress, a rather doubtful item this, as it grows in rivers and we know what fish do in rivers.

By far the most curious of these ‘salad’ constituents is something called ‘lettuce’. Really weird stuff this, greenish, mostly but can be frosty white, it comes in many colours, and degrees of crispness and you can eat as much as you like and not gain a single pound.

I miss the sugar, though, but a parallel discovery is fruit, which apparently contains all the sugar you want – this probably accounts for it being so sweet. Oddly enough, you can actually buy a container confusingly called ‘fruit salad’, which is a double bonus, although I couldn’t find any ‘lettuce’ in the one I purchased.

Biggest discovery of all is, if you eat less, and drink less, you too could lose weight and get a round of applause from your fellow slimmers.

ARUN District Council leader, Gill Brown’s recent assertion that voters have, in this area, always voted Tory and will continue to do so, may well come back to haunt her.

The electorate in general does not appear overly enamoured with the current regime and its seeming lack of interest in popular opinion and, in these days of social media and communication, people may well decide to march to a more independent drummer.

As Bob Dylan so famously sang, ‘the times they are a’changing’.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC? Well, maybe, but it isn’t a movie soundtrack, that’s for sure, as we have not heard such a thing since we were robbed of our cinema 268 days ago, now.