Four hundred and still rising. That is how many letters we have had from you since our story about Southern Water charging some customers millions since privatisation for a service they didn't get.

We've had a letter from company managing director Ronnie Mercer, too. He said Southern Water has always charged according to Government regulations, never a penny more. The cost of the waste water service is averaged among customers. Surface water and highway drainage charges have always been payable but are now shown separately on bills and this year people with their own soakaways can claim a rebate.

Mr Mercer says the Argus did not reveal that industry watchdog Ofwat and the Government endorsed Southern Water's offer of these rebates. There was no secret, the opportunity to apply for a rebate was on water bills. And there had been no overcharging in the past.

"There is no question of any rebate being payable in respect of previous years . . . there is no money in the bank waiting to be repaid for previous years and local MPs should know this."

Cynical old me. Southern Water told customers about this only after Ofwat ordered a shake-up. That sounds secret. I reckon the company should have declared this off its own bat from the word go and given rebates.

The water company has the biggest profit margin of any in the world. As they say in the supermarkets: "Would you like cash back?" Not half!

About six weeks ago I told you Bob Wilkins, East Sussex County Council's transport director, challenged figures given to MPs that made the county seem a dangerous place to drive. We correctly reported a Commons answer that 122 people out of every 100,000 who lived there in 1998 died or were badly hurt on the roads. West Sussex returned a figure of 78, Brighton and Hove 61. Now Mr Wilkins has written to say Whitehall admitted a mistake. The correct figure is 90. He is waiting for a further response to his point that a major contributory factor is the poor trunk road network, the Government's responsibility.

We were in error in a report early last month about Alan Scott, from Whitehawk, who was remanded by Brighton magistrates accused of threatening to blow up his home. We incorrectly said he had been detained under the Mental Health Act. My apologies.

We got in a tangle with the weather forecast yesterday, muddling up the days in the three-day outlook and using the symbol for brilliant sunshine even though we said it would be mostly cloudy. Sorry.

I don't like roller coasters. I remember too well a long-ago bank holiday when the ratchet clanking me to the top of the first big dip let go and the car rolled backwards, seemingly forever.

You wouldn't get me on the world's tallest and fastest. But which one is it? In our Did You Know? slot last Thursday we gave the honour to Superman: The Escape in California. It's 415ft high and reaches speeds up to 100mph. A confused F.W.C. Parkhouse wrote to say that on the same day a national paper said it was the 310ft, 92mph Millennium Force in Ohio. I've surfed the web and trawled the Guinness Book of Records. The answer is both rides are the tallest and fastest, because people to whom such distinctions matter regard them as different sorts of roller coaster. The Millennium is a steel coaster because it runs on a full circuit but Superman is a shuttle coaster because it doesn't. So now you know. But I still ain't going on either of them!

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