I’M speaking at the Festival of Thrift on Saturday and wondering what words to use.

As many as 30,000 people are expected at the festival which celebrates old-fashioned frugal concepts, such as living on a budget, with a modern upcycling twist.

It is at the old Patons and Baldwins factory, which was built in the post-war age of austerity to create knitting wool for people who had to be parsimonious with their money.

I’ve always thought of thrift as a negative, niggardly concept. To me, it’s a tightwad of a word, meaning scrimping and saving just to get by, but my dictionary tells me I’m wrong. Originally, more than 1,000 years ago, thrift was a joyous word, all about growing, flourishing, prospering and thriving.

But over the centuries, it evolved to mean that one was prospering by making careful use of money and resources.

The pretty seaside plant called thrift is the epitome of thrift. With its pink flowers, it grows and prospers in the meanest soil in the poorest salt-blasted conditions. It thrives by being thrifty.

I think there’s a scale of thrifty words, and as you go down the scale, the words become increasingly negative.

Frugal comes after thrift. It has a miserly feel, but it too begins positively – it comes from the Latin word for profit or fruit. The English, aided by Shakespeare, added the concept of careful management to it so that a frugal lifestyle is one in which you make sparing use of the fruits of your labours.

Further down the thrifty scale is austerity, a word we’ve adopted from French where it has religious overtones – a stern, severe, harsh lifestyle was adopted by austere monks. In 1945, the English coined it to suit their harsh economic conditions.

Parsimony is a word that is falling out of favour, although it too has Latin beginnings and means acting sparingly.

The best word is at the bottom of the thrifty scale: niggardliness. A niggard is a person who nigs – a long lost Scandinavian concept of miserliness, of being grudgingly stingy with money.

Old North-East miners often had a niggard in their house. It was a firebrick that they put into the grate to nig and save fuel.

I’ll be sparing with my words on Saturday in my free talk at midday about the history of Patons and Baldwins, but it would be extremely niggardly not to include a few about thrift.

A WEEK ago, with the nation’s eyes on the Scottish independence referendum, another election result slipped by unnoticed. Unsurprising, really, because it was for a Durham County Council seat at Crook which, unsurprisingly, was won by Labour with 47 per cent of the 1,700 votes cast.

The voters of Crook had also been presented with two parties who hadn’t contested the seat the last time around: the Conservative Party and the UK Independence Party.

The Tories bottomed the poll with 5.6 per cent of the votes, whereas Ukip came second with 21 per cent.

People who examine parish pump polls tell me this was an average Ukip performance – it is becoming the anti-Labour party in the North-East. A Conservative Party which wanted to grow and prosper across the whole country would be reaching out to those voters but it is unthriftily, if there’s such a word, allowing Ukip to thrive.