Have we got newts for you?

6:04am Wednesday 8th August 2007

A FELLER with a newt on a lead goes into a pub, asks for a pie and a pickled egg and is about to sit down when the landlord asks the name of his newt. "Tiny," says the new customer.

The landlord says it's a funny name and asks why the creature's called Tiny.

"Because," says the customer, "it's my newt."

SO goes the world's only known joke about newts, a pretty unappealing crittur with which I have been seriously occupied of late.

Wearing a different hat - a peace pilgrim's, probably - I have been much involved in trying to resolve the problems between Spennymoor Town Football Club and the town council, its landlords.

They are delicate and private and need not be revisited here. Save that, as if there weren't enough to worry about, the Brewery Field is inhabited by the great-crested newt, or triturus cristatus to its more learned friends.

"It could only be worse," someone told a public meeting last Monday, "if they'd found a giant panda at the back of the stand."

Another speaker remarked upon the universal desire to keep the great crested happy - "as happy as little bunny rabbits," he added, rather marring his metaphors - while Alastair Ross, the football club's solicitor, told of a development in Stockton where vehicles are only allowed on site if preceded by a chap on foot to check for newts.

It was a bit like the early Stockton and Darlington Railway engines, and the feller with the red flag.

Newts are an endangered species, legally protected all over Europe. They can live to be 27, grow to 17cm, and when mating between May and August all but hang out a "Do not disturb" sign like a dirty weekend in Whitby.

In the meantime, the peace process continues. I wonder who's Kissinger now.

THE North-East seems curiously to be swimming with the little blighters, the Echo's archives wick with stories of crest practice and newt points.

As far back as 1989, we reported how firemen tackling a blaze at a nature reserve near Fencehouses, in County Durham, had had to relay water down a bumpy track because the pond which offered a much nearer supply had resident newts.

We have had newts rescued, if not necessarily airlifted, from a former RAF base at Marske, newts "given the red carpet treatment" at Urlay Nook, near Eaglescliffe, development delayed all over the place because newts might be discomforted.

There's a ceramic newt mosaic at Flaxton, near York, a willow-stick newt sculpture at Cowpen Bewley, near Billingham. Only recently, the Echo reported a "whole raft of measures" to help them.

The beggars doubtless jumped eagerly, and amphibiously, aboard.

RACHEL Jackson, nice lass, is Darlington's great-crested newt project officer. Honest. She works from the town hall, is funded by the Lottery and other sources, cares greatly for their welfare but is under no illusions.

"They are extremely ugly little animals and we try to use that to our advantage," says Rachel. "People compare them to mini-dragons, it helps keep the interest up."

Not for nothing do some call it the warty newt, too.

Darlington, and the rest of what these days we are supposed to call the Tees Valley, is awash with wetlands - the entire region, indeed, may be akin to the newts of the world.

Look at a map of the Darlington area, says Rachel, and you can hardly develop a housing estate without it being near a pond - the ponds and an area 500m around is protected.

"There are a lot in the North-East, but we need to preserve them because they're becoming so rare elsewhere in Europe. There are issues of bio-diversity and of maintaining the food chain; I don't think at all that the balance has been tipped in favour if the newt."

SO how on earth did that poor, protected species earn a reputation for inebriation? Why as drunk - the term has been diluted, according to taste - as a newt?

Etymologist extraordinaire Nigel Rees finds a reference back as far as 1957 but is unable convincingly to suggest the origin. Maybe it's the drink to blame.

"Could it be," he wonders, "that a newt, being an amphibious reptile, can submerge itself in liquid as a drunk might do?"

So why not as drunk as a frog?

"Perhaps," adds Rees, "a newt's tight-fitting skin reflects the state of being tight."

So why not as tight as a snake?

Ray Puxley's Dictionary of British Slang notes "newted" but admits uncertainty over the unfortunate amphibian's reputation for bibulousness. In truth there are hardly any records of drunken newts, though one or two are known to like a cherry brandy on New Year's Eve.

One of the websites postulates that it could be a reference to the newt's walking motion - "The side-to-side action is like a drunk lurching down the street" - though the contributor may have been on the happy juice, too.

Other creatures have a similar reputation, of course, ranging from a tick to a barrel full of monkeys. Recording a misplaced maritime adventure, New Zealand humorist Fred Dagg wrote:

"And the sea was quite lumpy and the weather was foul,

And the bloke with the map was as ****** as an owl."

It remains a five-pint mystery. Readers may have more sober reflections by next week.

MUCH the best-known human amphibian is Newt Gingrich, US congressman, former speaker of the House of Representatives and Time magazine Man of the Year. Gingrich also has a reputation as a philanderer, but always - as contrite as a Newt - gets down on his knees to ask God for forgiveness afterwards. Sadly, his real name is Newton.

ROOM for little but great-cresteds in today's column, save to report some additions from John Heslop in Durham to the list of North-East place names which sound almost human.

What, he asks, of Patrick Brompton, near Bedale, Kirk Merrington - nice one, that - near Spennymoor, Dalton Piercey, near Hartlepool, or Cherry Burton, on the Wolds?

Church folk might also wish to include Archdeacon Newton - that hamlet just north-west of Darlington - though there never was a senior cleric of that name. "Newton" simply meant new town.

Though it never got off the ground, the Archdeacon pub in town still bears an image of the Ven Michael Perry, retired Archdeacon of Durham. Canon Perry looks suitably sober.

A FINAL, ecclesiastical, thought. The Church Times reports the retirement from the Diocese of York of the Rev David Perry, Vicar of Skirlaugh with Long Riston, Rise and Swine. Tempting as it is to suppose an early-morning misprint, Rise and Swine are adjoining parishes on the Wolds.

Newt for your comfort, the column returns next week.