WHEN Geri Halliwell feels bloated, she cuts out wheat and loses half a stone. "I'm suffering from a food allergy," she announces. And before you know it young, impressionable teenage girls everywhere want one, to go alongside the mock Prada handbag and Gucci boots, just like Geri's.

Experts warn that food allergies are increasingly being seen as a faddy trend because celebrities like Geri use them as excuses for new diet crazes. This is dangerous, because it trivialises the very real problem of true, life-threatening food allergies, which are on the increase, particularly among children.

Three youngsters at our village school, including one of my sons, suffer from serious food allergies. When one of them, allergic to milk, took just one bite of a supposedly vegan chocolate egg last Easter, he was rushed to hospital and ended up on the point of cardiac arrest. The egg had been contaminated with just a trace of milk product in the factory where it had been packed. That, Geri, is a food allergy. What you are suffering from is self-obsession, a desperate desire to seek attention and occasional trapped wind.

I AM as grateful as the next woman (or at least most of them) that football has been booted off Saturday night's TV schedules. But Cilla Black, who describes the move as a "victory for women", has an inflated view of the importance of her show Blind Date, which replaces it. Winning the right to vote and equal pay were victories for women. But watching a tediously repetitive old game show full of brash, empty-headed wannabe TV presenters who read naff, scripted lines from an autocue? I don't think so.

I KNOW Cherie Blair is not stupid. So why exactly was she shocked when she agreed to open an alternative therapy centre and found the event packed with reporters? Mrs Blair fired off a splenetic letter to the owner Bharti Vyas, complaining that the embarrassing coverage caused distress and anger. Surely Cherie and her advisors know how the Press works by now. Is she really surprised everyone wants to comment on treatments and therapies that she has endorsed? And, considering everything else that is happening in the world at the moment, does it really matter?

I DID stick up for former Northern Echo reporter Yvonne Ridley, heavily criticised for putting herself at risk to cover events in Afghanistan, despite being the single mother of a nine-year-old daughter. After all, isn't it the Taliban that doesn't allow women to work, while we in the West are supposedly more enlightened? But then I heard Yvonne interviewed on Radio Four last week, explaining why she had gone on hunger strike while imprisoned by the Taliban. Her newspaper claimed she was objecting to her treatment. But Yvonne told a different story: "I needed to lose weight and this was a good opportunity," she said. She went on to reveal that her immediate reaction on being captured was disbelief - at just how attractive the Taliban soldier who arrested her was. She made it sound like an episode of Absolutely Fabulous. As a war correspondent, Yvonne's clearly in the wrong job.

Published: Friday, November 09, 2001