"The age range is from 16-year-olds to people in their eighties who perhaps have some illness. There are homeless people, kids who have come to London expecting the streets to be paved with gold, people who have embezzled money and spent it all. Then there was the young woman who jumped under a train at Oxford Circus. She was OK, but she was taken to hospital because they were concerned that she may have damaged her neck. They let her out after she'd been checked over, and that evening she jumped under a Northern Line train at Warren Street. The last thing that anybody wants to deal with is a fatality We te n d to think we can't show our weaknesses You front it out.

Even a body in one piece is not nice, and if you see something which is in pieces, it's not nice at all."John Self has seen many such incidents. First, according to statistics, only 50 per cent of jumpers are killed. John Self, fresh from witnessing a death-dive outside his window: "What happens is that the person is knocked down into the [undertrack] pits. They may be trapped, conscious, while the ambulance services carry out minor surgery on site."What about those 25,000-volt rails with the terracotta pots? "On a four-rail system you have a positive rail and a negative rail, and it's the current that kills you rather than the voltage. You can bridge the gap and be electrocuted, but generally speaking people are killed or maimed by the train."Our message would be: Whatever problem you have, this is not going to solve it, because first, a lot of people don't die, and second, they may get maimed and end up with a much bigger problem."To irritated passengers whose journey is disrupted by the incident, the jumper is known as the "person on the line" To Underground staff, he or she becomes a "One-Under". PC Derek Rule, a British Transport Police spokesman, says: "Police officers call it the John Wayne syndrome. One severe d arm, awaiting collection, was allegedly dragged down a platform by a feral cat.A degree of Schadenfreude surrounds the grisly task of cleaning up the mess.

As the familiar rattle and boom approaches its climax, he launches himself into the path of the oncoming train, looking for the dark at the end of the tunnel.In the excitement, he has overlooked certain facts. Instead, he stands poised in a passageway or on a staircase, listening for the distant drone of a Tube engine. There is a momentumto the jumper's last act; once set in motion, he hopes it cannot be stopped. He doesn't mingle on the platform with commuters, fearful perhaps that they may "put him off".

These all serve nearby mental institutions and psychiatric units (the Springfield at Tooting, the Maudsley near the Oval, and Whittington Hospital's Waterloo Unit, as well as the Old Friern Hospitalnear the Archway). Research it commissioned 18 months ago showed previous "black spots"at Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway, the Oval and Archway. There is speculation that when they close down,numbers go up. Trevor Dowens, operations manager of the Tyne and Wear Metro, says, "My own research showed a connection between suicides at Gosforth station and the nearby St Nicholas Hospital. People there have been discharged for the day and jumped straight in front of a train."London Underground Ltd believes the recent cluster of suicides on the Victoria Line might be linked to the location of shelters near Vauxhall station (Centre Point and the Lord Clyde). Suicide clusters at particular stations have been linked by research and anecdotal evidence to the proximity of hostels and mental institutions in the area. "For whatever reason, we've had a spate of them recently. For a couple of weeks it seemed to be one after another." John Self, manager of London Underground's Victoria Line, is referring to four suicides in rapid succession on his turf alone This is unusual, but not particularly surprising.

A survey there of 935 five to eight-year-olds found that 5.1 per cent went without bre akfast while 11 per cent made do with junk food such as biscuits. The children, from low-income areas, could not compensate later for their lack of breakfast, since most of the schools they attended banned all mid-morning snacks apart from fruit, the authors report in the Health Education Journal.. So hopefully I've got it under control."The Stroke Association, CHSA House, Whitecross Street, London, EC1Y 8JJ Tel: 071 490 7999.. Healthy eating policies in schools could mean that some children are not getting enough high-energy food needed for growth, research from Southampton suggests. A recent survey by the Stroke Association revealed that some people who know they have hypertension fail to return to their GPs for treatment. Sylvia McLauchlan understands this ostrich-likeattitude."It's quite hard to keep on going back to the doctor, particularly when you've got something that doesn't make you feel ill.