A few people appear to have been offended by the use of the term fatties on a headline on this website the other day.

The story it headed was referred to in yesterday's entry and concerned the £300,000 adaptation of ambulances for obese people.

Someone even compared it to the use of a derogatory term for Chinese people, which I feel is a little over the top.

I'm not so sure it is offensive personally, but then again I don't weigh 30-plus stone so I am very sorry if anyone took offence, that was not the intention.

I don't think of fat as being a derogatory term. You hear doctors and health experts using it all the time. On the other hand I've never heard immigration officials or diplomats using the derogatory Chinese term.

Is saying someone is fat any worse than saying they are short? Or ginger?

Anyway, that's me told and I'll think more carefully next time I write a headline.

* I HAD a pleasant lunch today with the good folk from the Wiltshire and Swindon Community Foundation, with whom we hold our Gazette Community Fund.

We started an appeal in 2000 and raised £30,000 to build a fund that would give yearly grants. Now every November we have around £1,000 to give away.

We decided rather than blow it all on one cause we would give several small grants. So every year we can give £200 or so to a handful of groups who are too small to attract grant funding - groups like The Kennet Valley Sixty Plus Group, who provide a regular meeting place for the elderly out in villages where many folk are isolated.

A couple of hundred quid is not much but it makes a huge difference to the organisers of groups like this. Many of them fund activities out of their own pockets because they can't access grants from anywhere else.

The Kennet group will be able to book speakers and buy a Christmas lunch for their members. I only wish we had more cash to give away.

Talking of cash, I hope everyone in Wiltshire will be voting for the Calne Castlefields Park Project on Monday in the ITV People's Millions contest.

The project, to upgrade parkland in the town and create a peaceful haven, will be competing against a good cause in Gloucestershire for an £86,000 lottery grant.

I think there is something faintly obscene about pitting two charities against each other in the name of TV entertainment.

Thousands of people will be voting, hopefully, which will leave a lot of disgruntled people when the winner is announced.

People won't want to back a loser and I fear for the future of whichever project doesn't win.

Having said all that, the Castlefields project needs your votes so check the news section on Monday for the voteline number and get dialling...