ON Wednesday, I visited Castle Chare in Durham City, a steep, narrow, cobbled lane that rattled the exhaust off my car. I clattered over to Bishop Auckland to drop off a package, and took a turning down Wear Chare, a steep, narrow lane, with my undercarriage making a racket.

But I made it safely to Darlington where, with a friendly mechanic on the case, I went for lunch and wandered down Post House Wynd – a flat, narrow lane. Could this lack of steepness, I wondered, be the difference between a wynd and a chare?

But the dictionary says the words mean the same. A chare is an English word 1,000 or more years old, meaning a turning – although the only version of it that we would use today is achar, or ajar, which is a door that is neither open nor closed and so is “on the turn”.

A wynd is more only 600 or so years old, and it too means a turning, a winding. It is considered a Scottish word, although it spreads as far south as Darlington, Leeds and Sheffield, whereas chare is totally North-East: there are chares from Lindisfarne in the north down through Morpeth, Hexham and Chester-le-Street to Bishop Auckland in the south. Newcastle once had 20 chares winding off the Quayside.

It is such a North-East word that a Victorian history of Newcastle tells of the confusion it caused in court when a witness said: "I saw three men coming out of the foot of the chare."

The judge, not from these parts, immediately thought of furniture, and said to the jury: "You must pay no credit to this man's evidence. He is clearly insane."

To which the jury foreman replied: "We understand the witness very well. He speaks words of truth and soberness."

But it is confusing. While I was winding my way down Castle Chare, other people in the centre of Durham were turning down vennels – another word for alleyways, this one stolen from French. Like wynd, it is considered Scottish – Durham may be the only English place to use “vennels”.

So what makes a vennel a vennel and a chare a chare? What happens between Bishop Auckland, where there are four chares, and Darlington where there is only a wynd? Perhaps there is no logic to it. Perhaps this alley of investigation – be it a chare, wynd or vennel – has led to a dead end.

I WAS on TV last night, talking to Michael Portillo on Great British Railway Journeys on BBC2. There was, though, no need to adjust your set (or your iPad if you find it on iPlayer). I really was that colour.

I had spent the day before filming on top of Grinton Moor above Reeth, waiting for the Tour de France. Despite the uninterrupted sun, it was a naggingly chilly day with a cruel breeze that tore through one's Lycra. I woke up the following morning with my bald head glowing as if it had been under a grill.

I was both sunburnt and windblown.

"What's happened to you?" asked Michael, as he arrived at the Echo's office in Priestgate.

Fortunately, he wasn't wearing one of his vivid maroon jackets otherwise we'd have clashed terribly, but at least I made history as the world’s first televised talking plum.