OF course we all believe in magic. Why else would the Atkins diet be only just behind Harry Potter in the best-sellers list?

Every month there's another best-selling diet book. Every month there's another celebrity-endorsed video telling us how to exercise our way to slimness. Every month there's a whole new range of so-called "healthy eating" ready meals landing on our shelves. Every month there are new supplements, vitamins, treatments, wraps, pills, potions, patches, creams and even inflatable trousers. All of them promise that we will be slim, sexy, lean and toned.

And are we?

No, of course we're not. All that happens is that we're getting bigger than ever. True, some diets work for a time. One minute we have celebrities telling us that they're blissfully happy with their size 14 selves, the next they're looking like anorexic stick insects. And just when we've got used to that, and bought their video and diet book, they've piled the weight on and are up to size 16 and more.

Just think of Oprah Winfrey, Anne Diamond and Vanessa Feltz. Despite all their money and the added prod of being in the public eye, they can't get diets to work. So what hope for the rest of us?

Diets and diet books can never work. Why not? Because they make us think about food all the time.

And that, as all we lapsed dieters know, is fatal. Once you think about what you can or cannot eat, you spend all your time thinking of food, dreaming of it, fantasising about it, waiting for the next fix - and nibbling a biscuit here, a bag of crisps there and a bit of sandwich when nobody's looking.

By the time you sit down to your calorie controlled, portion prepared, well-adjusted meal, you've already nibbled enough on the side to keep a 16-stone navvy fed for a day's hard physical slog.

If we thought about food less, we would probably eat less too and would consequently be in much better physical shape.

There is, I'm sorry, no magic spell to make you effortlessly thin. But you could start by ditching your diet books.

It could be a real weight off your mind, and lots of other bits of you too.

SCHOOL holidays have started and everywhere you go you see active grandparents pushing babies in buggies, in supermarkets patiently helping three-year-olds choose just the right cereal for breakfast or keeping up with energetic ten-year-olds at the pool.

They're doing a grand job. Mostly, they look as if they're enjoying themselves. Their children are undoubtedly grateful and the grandchildren seem blissfully happy.

But if we're all going to be working till we're 70 and beyond, who's going to be left to look after our grandchildren in summer holidays yet to come?

SCIENTISTS have come up with a new drug that cuts the shopaholic's urge to spend by around 50 per cent.

Oh yes. I bet it only stops them buying boring things like loo rolls and oven cleaner, and is utterly ineffectual against shoes, dresses, earrings and anything at all of a totally frivolous nature.

Doing without necessities is easy - it's giving up luxuries that hurts.

SHOULD five-year-olds know about sex? Of course they should. Not the full - how can I put this? - ins and outs of it. At that age, we can probably skip the instruction manual and putting the condoms on cucumbers. But they should certainly know what it's about.

And at that age it's so easy to tell them - they ask questions, you answer them. Easy peasy. There is none of that face-reddening, stomach-clenching embarrassment that you have to cope with if you leave it all to their teenage years, when it might, in any case, be far too late.

Small children are also fascinated by their bodies, so questions arise naturally and inevitably and they are delighted by the magic of it all. Teenagers, on the other hand, mostly profoundly wish that their body was nothing to do with them and do not wish to be reminded.

A big plus is that the younger they are, the more you can influence your child with your morals. When you have a rampant adolescent, all raging hormones and desperate urges, the chances of them listening to a talk on kindness, gentleness, respect and restraint are, frankly, close to zilch. But brainwash them from birth and you're in with a chance.

There again, when my then three-year-old asked how his baby brother had got into mummy's tummy, I explained clearly and carefully, pitching it right for his level of understanding.

He stopped what he was doing. He stared at me in astonishment as I explained what the act of sex involved. Then he burst into wonderful three-year-old giggles.

"But that's silly!" he said, rolling over in paroxysms of mirth.

The trouble is, he could be right.

That's what I call inconvenient

I DON'T know what the rights and wrongs are in the BA staff walk-out at Heathrow. But for checkout operators to take their action on the first day of the school holidays seems particularly bloody-minded, affecting thousands of ordinary people like themselves. They are apparently protesting about "inconvenient working patterns".

Not half as inconvenient as spending half your holiday squashed with thousands of others all getting increasingly hot, bothered and bad tempered.

Meanwhile, those of us holidaying at home this year can allow our sympathy to be tinged with just a teensy weensy dash of smugness. Until, of course, we hit the ten-mile tailbacks on the A1.