A LOP can be many things. It can be the small branch or twig at the top of a tree which gets loped off by gardeners with a pair of lopers. It can be a type of rabbit with drooping ears that lop about – dangle loosely – down the side of its face.

More than a thousand years ago, a lop was a spider, but then the Vikings brought over a word, “hloppa”, which meant “to leap”, and so a lop became a flea.

As Peter Barron explained on Monday, if you are “as fit as a lop” then you are leaping athletically about like a flea. Fleas are wingless insects so they don’t fly. Instead, they use their springy legs to jump – they are one of the best jumpers in the insect world, clearing up to half-a-metre horizontally in search of something to bite for blood.

Peter went on to say that many flea-filled cinemas were nicknamed “the penny lop” which , for me, caused a penny to drop.

In Memories in Saturdays’ papers, I am writing about Darlington’s eight purpose-built pre-war cinemas, and people are writing in with their recollections. Quite a few mention how they came out after watching a movie with their legs covered in red bite marks, and so several cinemas were given nicknames like “the Bug and Flea”, and “the Itch and Scratch”. One in particular was known as the “Loppy Opera”.

Now I understand why the nickname came about, but I’m not sure that I should reveal which one it was applied to, because back in the 1990s, I received a letter from solicitors apparently representing the descendants of a cinema proprietor saying they would sue me for allegedly damaging the family’s reputation by suggesting that the Loppy Opera was flea-infested.

I HAVE been painting the outside windows – well, actually I’ve been clinging to the top of the ladder whenever the mildest breeze gusted by, not brave enough to stretch my brush out too far, and not daring to look down because it is a very long way.

And that’s just the ground floor.

Before I started, I looked out the sugar soap to wash off the decades of dirt and dead spiders. This meant delving into kitchen sink cupboard where the cleaning materials are kept.

There were bottles of hob cleaner, oven cleaner, kitchen cleaner, non-toxic kitchen cleaner, all-purpose eco-cleaner, multi-purpose ocean cleaner, heavy duty cleaner, anti-bacterial surface cleaner, lemon cream cleaner, hand cleaner, pet cleaner, carpet cleaner, window cleaner, houseplant cleaner, washing machine cleaner, dishwasher cleaner, daily granite cleaner and stainless steel cleaner (“your kinder cleaner”, said the label). Plus, at the back, there was a bottle of yellow gloop called “sugar soap”.

Up my ladder, desperate to take my mind off the drop, I realised that whereas all the other cleaners cleaned exactly what they said on the label, sugar soap did not.

So I smelled it. Not sweet. I tasted it. Not sweet. And so I came down and googled it.

The main ingredient in sugar soap turns out to be sodium carbonate, or washing soda. Some sources said that sugar soap gets its name because in its dry powdery form, white sodium carbonate looks like a pile of sugar; others said that when diluted, it has a sugary texture.

Anyway, it got the job done, and I didn’t off. Which was sweet.