SELECT problem

I am obviously doing something very stupid, but I get a problem using
specific columns in a SELECT statement.  I am running 7.2 on a Debian
system.

The problem is that when I reference a specific column, it says attribute
not found, but the column is there, at least according to \d.  Here is the
\d for the table (called sites) the result from a SELECT * and the offending
SELECT AREA.  Now I did check that AREA was not a keyword, and it would appear
not to be.  I also checked after this log with some data in the table, but
it made no difference.

Any ideas:

Here is the console output:-

landn=# \d sites
                 Table "sites"
  Column   |         Type          | Modifiers
-----------+-----------------------+-----------
 CUSTNAME  | character varying(8)  |
 AREA      | character varying(8)  |
 SITE      | character varying(24) |
 NAME      | character varying(24) |
 BUILDING  | character varying(50) |
 TOWN      | character varying(50) |
 COUNTY    | character varying(50) |
 POSTCODE  | character varying(15) |
 GRIDREF   | character varying(12) |
 LATITUDE  | character varying(12) |
 LONGITUDE | character varying(12) |

landn=# select * from sites;
 CUSTNAME | AREA | SITE | NAME | BUILDING | TOWN | COUNTY | POSTCODE |
GRIDREF | LATITUDE | LONGITUDE
----------+------+------+------+----------+------+--------+----------+---------+----------+-----------
(0 rows)

landn=# select area from sites;
ERROR:  Attribute 'area' not found
landn=#