HOW do you fancy three weeks in paradise?

Soft, white sand; gentle, azure waves; a private, beach-front apartment; and personal masseurs on hand (on your back, on your shoulders, wherever) 24 hours a day.

Sounds heavenly, doesn't it? If that was all there was to it, I would wholeheartedly agree.

But this is not your average package deal, this is the latest detoxing, weight-loss treatment, and it's an absolute doozy.

For £2,000, you get to spend three weeks in a beautiful Thai resort. Unfortunately, you don't get to sample any beautiful Thai food. Not a morsel. Not a scrap. Nada. For three whole weeks.

I've heard of the cabbage diet (my former sister-in-law was on it once and almost blew a hole in the ozone layer), the pineapple diet (apparently the excessive acid rots your teeth and leaves your gut in tatters - where do I sign up?) and the cake doesn't count diet (that one was specially formulated by my best mate, who spent endless hours weighing and measuring every morsel she ate but found it physically impossible to walk past a vanilla slice).

But the eating no food at all diet is a new one on me. To be honest, I thought that particular method went under a different name - starvation.

But you'll have to excuse my ignorance. I had two Weetabix this morning and they've gone straight to my head.

The idea that anyone would pay £2,000 to be starved for three weeks baffles me. Yes, you can have all the herbal tablets you can eat and drink as much wheatgrass laced with psyllium husks and calcium clay as you can physically tolerate, but it's hardly an all-you-can-eat buffet, is it?

And when the highlight of your day is a self-administered colonic irrigation using a plastic tube, a bucket and a bulldog clip, it's hardly the stuff of wish-you-were-here postcards either.

If a travel agent asked you to hand over a month's wage to eat clay and munch tablets that reportedly look and taste like rabbit poo, you'd probably tell them in no uncertain terms to go and give themselves a colonic. Does calling it a luxury detox and diet break really make that much difference?

If I gave you a bowl of Pedigree Chum and called it fillet steak, would it taste any better?

We don't need to starve ourselves in a Thai beach hut, we just need to eat less and move more. Boring, I know, but it works.



A week or two ago I wrote about how my children regularly trip, slip, explode and generally knock, slice and gouge great lumps off themselves at inopportune moments.

This week my daughter was invited to her school chum's birthday party. It was her first ever official invitation so she was extremely excited (she woke up on the hour every hour each night for a fortnight yelling: "I'm going to a party! I'm going to a party!" until suitably stifled with a pillow).

I now realise I should have wrapped her tightly in cotton wool and had her hand-delivered by Securicor direct to her friend's front door. But I didn't.

Instead, I stupidly let her skip along merrily in her Disney Princess party dress (she favours Ariel, the Little Mermaid).

Everything was fine until she spotted the balloons hanging on the gate. Then the excitement became too much and she felt compelled to break into a sprint.

I hardly need to tell you that she caught her foot in the hoop in her frock (of course), missed the soft grass verge and plummeted to the cold hard pavement (naturally) and decided to use her face to break her fall (well, what else is a girl to do?).

She eventually stumbled bloodily into the party, looking less like a pretty fairytale princess and more like an extra from Reservoir Dogs, only with more gore.

Oh, and did I happen to mention that the birthday girl was the same friend who smashed her head open during their last playdate and ended up at the sticky end of a glue stick in casualty?

I'm not sure my nerves can take much more.