MICHAEL Adamson’s funeral overflowed not just St John’s at Nevilles Cross – the church where he’d married Marian Coleman exactly 46 years previously – but the marquee and the churchyard as well.

There must have been getting on a thousand. He could probably have put a name to every one of them, recalled where and when last they’d met and adorned it with an anecdote.

Huge and hearty, genial and generous, Mike had been managing director of the Durham-based Ramside Estates hotel group which his personality and acumen had helped build and prosper.

We’d first met 40 years ago this month when Ramside were about to open the Hardwick Hall Hotel at Sedgefield, a former maternity home where I and many others were born and which he was memorably to manage.

Mike had also invited Dorothy Holmes, former midwife and matron and the woman who, bless her, had dragged me and our kidder into the world. Good looking one first.

We remained not just friends but kindred spirits, perhaps because both of us liked a drink (shall we say) but also because both of us – t’other Mike especially – found losing weight one of life’s great imponderables.

“I’ve been to more Weight Watchers classes than I’ve had hot dinners, and I’ve had an awful lot of hot dinners,” the old recidivist once observed.

Alan Davison, who gave the eulogy, recalled holidays in Malta when Mike would fry up huge breakfasts as soon as the ladies’ backs were turned.

“It wasn’t very good for the diet,” he said, “but it was wonderful for the soul.”

Mike was awarded the MBE in 2004, officially for services to hospitality and tourism in the North-East.

Asked about it, he’d insist it was for singing and dancing on the tables in the Hardwick.

A good send-off, anyway. Emotional readings from two grandchildren, Wind Beneath My Wings sung superbly by a third and If, Kipling’s unconditionally celebrated poem, read by Mike’s son John.

“My dad was a flash of colour in a grey world,” added John, and the place will, indeed, be wholly duller without Michael Gilbert Adamson.

SAD, too, to learn of the passing of the Reverend Gillian Bobbett, minister until 2004 of the United Reformed churches at Low Row and Keld, in Swaledale, and before that at Stockton. She was 74.

Though born in Cumbria, Gillian had never even visited the Yorkshire dales until leading a youth club trip to Keld. She was sacklessly, seminally, smitten.

She had a maths degree, worked for Marconi in the south, became a minister at 29 and never once regretted it. “What I was doing at Marconi was about the level of a cryptic crossword puzzle. I thought the church was more important,” she said.

We’d met several times, twice at the annual Smarber open-air service where the good shepherd could be heard calling his flock in that curious patter known as Swaudle, understood by increasingly few of the dale’s residents, but instinctively by all of the sheep.

Gillian’s successor, indeed, had been given just two bits of advice. The first was always to carry a torch – it gets Bible-black up there – the second never to preach about sheep because the locals know far more about them than the minister ever will.

Though she died on holiday in Canada, Gillian had stayed in Muker on retirement. Her funeral is at Kendal URC today, a service of thanksgiving and burial of ashes back at Keld next Wednesday (2pm).

She’d been unequivocal. “I don’t ever want to leave here now.”