LISTICLES are all the rage – even entering the Oxford dictionary yesterday.

Particularly popular on-line, a listicle is a cross between a list and an article.

You see listicles everywhere, from the salacious Ten Ways to Drive Your Lover Wild in Bed to the sedate History of the First World War in 50 Objects.

The great thing about them is that they require little effort from either reader or writer.

There is no story-telling nor argumentbuilding; there is nothing too taxing nor too testing (that would be called a t...). They are just a list of loosely thematic facts that can be dipped into as time allows.

This afternoon, I’ve been invited to give a short talk at the opening of Objects of Curiosity, an exhibition in Darlington library.

Funded by Creative Darlington and mima, the Objects of Curiosity are some of the mysterious artworks in the Darlington Collection – pictures of people who have become forgotten, places which have become lost and times that are no more. The hope is that visitors might be able to identify some.

So for my talk at Objects of Curiosity, I think I’ll prepare a listicle: Ten Curiosities About Darlington. These are the preliminary contenders for inclusion:

1. Look at the eyes of Joseph Pease’s statue: in 1859 in Germany, he had an iridectomy for a mis-shapen eyeball, in which his iris was cut into and blood vessels pulled out – all without anaesthetic. “He suffered much,” said The Northern Echo. He died in 1872 having been blind for seven years.

2. Tonides also stares down on High Row.

He purports to be a Greek god and was placed on a shop wall in Prebend Row in about 1920 to advertise “the delectable fragrance and smooth smoking qualities” of Tonides cigarettes, made by the Robert Sinclair Tobacco Company of Newcastle.

3. Timothy Ignatius Trebitsch Lincoln, the Liberal MP for Darlington from January to December 1910, is the only British MP to have ever held a post in the government of Germany – in 1920 for about 48 hours, he was the German Minister of Information.

4. The only footballer born in Darlington to play in the World Cup finals was Joseph – or Giuseppe – Wilson who, in 1974, appeared for Italy.

5. Darlington is unique in being ringed by late-Victorian cast iron markers which look like headstones but say “GPO 1 mile”.

About a dozen survive, but for the life of me I cannot find out why the Post Office installed them.

6. In 1538, 99 Darlingtonians were executed following the Rising of the North, and their bodies were hung from trees all along Coniscliffe Road – what a grisly sight.

7. As mentioned last week, for the first 30 years of the 20th Century, Darlington boasted the only crematorium between the Humber and the Tweed.

8. A Turkish crescent moon in the brickwork of the bathroom centre in Portland Place indicates it was originally a Turkish Baths in 1874. The tile-lined plunge pools can apparently still be found beneath the floorboards.

9. In 2002, Darlington’s 97th hairdressing salon opened, meaning that it had more hairdressers per head of population than any other town in Britain.

10. My favourite: in 1939, Darlington had more cinema seats per head of population than any other town in Britain.