I HAVE just bought a new salt grinder. I realise that this in itself is not headline news, although in our house it was a historic moment because for at least a year, the salt has been falling unground into a pile on the table so there is never any in the grinder when you want some.

The frustration of yet another unsalted boiled egg caused me to boil over, so I bravely went to a shop in Darlington’s Grange Road that sells such things – a salt seller, perhaps.

I was unprepared for the variety of grinders that confronted me. Big ones, small ones and medium ones; wooden ones, plastic ones, glass ones and metal ones; classic ones, retro ones, futuristic ones and designer ones...

“Or perhaps the Peugeot range...” said the salt seller.

And so I stumbled upon a stunning, if useless, fact.

In 1810, in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, brothers Jean-Pierre and Jean-Frederic Peugeot started making steel rods for crinoline dresses. They diversified, using their rods to make umbrellas, tools and then bicycles, and they dabbled in clock and watch mechanisms and sewing machines.

Saw blades were among their biggest sellers, because their steel stayed sharper for longer.

In 1840, they invented the coffeemill, with revolutionary helix-shaped teeth – made of the same unbluntable steel as their saw blades – that gripped and ground the beans into uniform particles. Two years later, they turned their coffeemill design into a patented peppermill, followed by the saltmill.

In 1858, the Peugeots adopted the lion as their trademark, partly because it was on the coat of arms of Franche-Comté and partly because it symbolised that their grinders were as strong as a lion’s jaws.

Peugeot spent the rest of the century happily making bikes and grinders, until in the 1890s, the cousins at the head of the firm, Armand and Eugène, fell out. Eugène wanted to continue making bikes and grinders, whereas Armand wanted to try to build cars.

They went their separate ways in 1896, both using the Peugeot lion on their different products.

So the Peugeot peppermill came before the Peugeot car, which was bombshell news to me. Speaking of which, to help anyone else faced with the fujll gamut of grinders in Grange Road, Jeremy Clarkson could make a comeback testdriving the Peugeot grinders while James May tried out the retro ones and Richard Hammond put the small plastic ones through their paces. We could call their new show Top Kitchengear.

LAST weekend, I followed the advice in the marvellous Memories section of this paper and visited Ingleby Arncliffe’s open gardens. Very impressive the gardens were too, although I was more interested in the 100-year-old water tower and the quaint church which nestles in the lowest slopes of the Cleveland Hills.

“The three-decker pulpit is of particular interest,” pointed out the guidebook, “and behind it stands a ‘nodding stick’, which was used by the parish clerk in days gone by to reprove inattentive members of the congregation.”

The nodding stick is slender, wobbly and about 9ft long. It would appear that if a member of the congregation nodded off during a sermon, one of the vicar’s helpers would deploy the stick to deliver a smack on the hand or the head to awake the sinner.

“Jesus,” they’d probably shout as they came round – in exclamation rather than exultation.

Perhaps because of my own inattention, I have never come across a nodding stick before. Can there be any other nodding sticks in our area?