THE bird has flown and that curmudgeon of a boss has retired. Several of you grumbled that the cartoon strips about Jasper the parrot and office life at Grindstone & Co are no longer in the paper.

I'm sorry you are disappointed but we felt they were getting a bit long in the tooth and the introduction of our new Teatime pages and improved TV listings was the ideal time to say farewell.

As you can see from today's pages, we now give more detail about what is on TV plus extra satellite channels. The new design means you can fold your paper so that all the main channels are on one page, a great improvement.

And that goes for the new Teatime pages, too. The crosswords are now at the bottom of a page that can be folded in half to make them easier to do, and that's important I am told by readers who, unlike me, can see at once the obvious solution to Victorian Poet Getting Sunburnt (the answer is Browning). My apologies however, that we made the crosswords slightly smaller. I've applied corrective training and they're back to their old size from today.

Look, too, at all the new daily features in the Teatime pages. There's agony aunt Rebecca Gray's answers to your problems; more stations in the radio listings; entertainment previews and reviews; what's on listings, our Sussex quiz and a great reader offer. It all makes your Argus better value than ever and you'll find those pages in the same place every weekday, right behind the TV.

Oh yes, there's room for a laugh, too, and we are delighted to now be able to bring you the world-famous Wizard of Id strip cartoon.

In the story in Monday's Argus about Sandra Holt and Kevin Myles who were victims of a bogus wedding announcement in a weekly paper we said the advert had been paid for anonymously in cash.

Paul Watson, editor of the Mid Sussex Times, which carried the hoax ad, took issue and said it was not paid for anonymously but falsely. A woman claiming to be Sandra Holt had booked the advert, paid for it and signed to indicate she had done so.

Mr Watson says this implied his paper did not check advert bookings. Quite so, we say, since the paper has been unable to find who actually placed the announcement. As Mr Watson concedes, his paper has since had to tighten up procedures so that adverts for forthcoming marriages have to be signed by both bride and groom.

The policy here at the Argus has always been that we will accept such adverts from bride, groom or bride's mother but require not only a signature on the paperwork but also proof of identity of the person placing the ad.

Beryl Fenton from Hove has asked me to correct an error in the caption alongside the picture of Stanford Avenue Methodist Church Youth Fellowship in the 1940s that appeared in Ahead a couple of weeks ago.

They were actually at Barcombe, not Balcombe and she was the person on the left in the front row, not the right. The reason she found it uncomfortable was because it was a weekend under canvas, a point we did not make entirely clear. My first and last, she writes. I'm with you there, Beryl. To borrow a line from an ancient joke, I too tried it once and didn't like it.

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