Shaken all over

The covering note says that it is for the area’s movers and shakers, though Ferryhill Town Band – carolling outside – appears not so much to be moving and shaking but nithered to the quick.

Happily there’s mulled wine inside, and boozy little nibbles, too.

The gathering’s at the former Backhouse’s Bank building in the market place. The room’s full, standing room only. There’s a chap who looks remarkably like the Archbishop of Canterbury – and in these days of miracles and wonders could well be – and another who spends the entire time bashing away on his smart phone.

Perhaps he’s playing Candy Crush, or whatever it is they do in the House of Commons; perhaps he’s a spy from Spennymoor or somewhere, wondering what in the world is going on.

The visionary Mr Ruffer, who has formed the Auckland Castle Trust, is present to enthuse further.

“If Bishop Auckland is to sing again it has to become a destination,” he says. “It’s great to scrub up a castle, but there are plenty of scrubbed up castles.

“Would you go to South Shields to see one? Well, maybe only once.”

To promote destination destiny they’ve identified 13 projects, known thereabouts as the string of pearls. The vision doesn’t just include turning the castle into the public domain – 150,000 visitors anticipated annually – but everything from the purchase of the nearby Binchester Roman fort – now complete – to a two-storey “Welcome building” with a 23ft tower.

“Something to give Bishop Auckland the Wow factor,” says a lady from the Trust.

The building in which we gather will become an art gallery, borrowing “world class” works from the Prado gallery in Spain. Next door, the former Barrington School will become a Spanish study centre, supported by Durham University.

The trust has bought the Queens Head and Post Chaise hotels in the market place, , plans an 80-seat restaurant at the castle’s reborn walled garden – “a place as beautiful by night as by day” it’s promised – and is particularly excited about the related Eleven Arches project on land beneath the handsome former railway viaduct on the line to Durham.

It’ll become the theme park venue – “epic, large scale and visually stunning” – for an open air “night show”, performed 30 times during the summer under the auspices of Puy du Fou, whose similar venture in France has run for 37 years and just been named the country’s No 1 attraction by Trip Advisor.

Puy du Fou are now exploring three further developments – in Moscow, alongside the Great Wall of China and in Bishop. Readers may need to consider that sentence again.

In Bishop Auckland there’ll be 6,000 seats and up to 600 volunteers, on and off and stage, to help tell the story of the North-East’s heritage. £19m is being sought from sponsors and other sources. “Puy du Fou will transform this town,” says Jonathan. “What’s important isn’t that it’s one person’s vision. It’s team work.”

It ends at 8pm. Outside, the festive market place is cold and quiet, though the last time we wrote about it, former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore – staying in one of the hotels – had complained of nocturnal shenanigans until 4am.

Very likely they’ll start again. Bishop Auckland may be a bit late stirring, but goodness knows it’s coming alive now.

THE line about movers and shakers appears wonderfully coincidental. It’s from a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, set to music in an 1870s cantata by Sir Edward Elgar and dedicated to Elgar’s great friend Nicholas Kilburn, a pump manufacturer and polymath who lived in Bishop Auckland. Elgar called him the Great Auk.

We are the music makers,
We are the dreamers of dreams…
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

“If this comes off, Bishop Auckland will have struck gold,” said local county councillor Rob Yorke, and whatever the noises off, few doubt that Jonathan Ruffer’s dreams will become an incomparable reality.

WHILST doubtless working on the perception that it’s grim up North, not even Jonathan Ruffer – Stokesley lad originally – may be able to do much about the weather. Whilst up here last Wednesday morning we were battered by strong winds and icy rain, in London it was delightful.

Borough Market’s the place to be, on the south bank of the Thames and close enough to Southwark Cathedral for Andrew Nunn, the Dean, to be giving a cake making demonstration.

“I took A-level cookery because I didn’t know what to do,” he tells the unlikely congregation. He failed, he adds.

Borough Market may be pretty close to a re-creation of a Dickens Christmas, not least in the evident good will about the place. Stallholders sell everything from suckling pig to gourmet goat, from bacon, cheese and bubble baps to beetroot and cranberry scotch eggs and a partridge and a truffled brie.

STORMING back, we head for Sunderland to an event promoted as a reunion for all North-East journalists past and present. About ten are there, including a five-year-old girl. “She’s our intern,” they say. The conversation may not be supposed festive: in the inky trade these days they look for tidings of comfort and joy and all they see is Santa Claus.

IT WAS in the first form at Bishop Auckland Grammar School, Mrs Wanless’s class all those years ago, that joyfully we were introduced to The Wind in the Willows. It stuck.

In what other columns might Mole’s aborted spring cleaning – “Bother, and Oh blow” – so frequently have been recalled? Where else might the question about a little wet and a water rat so often have been asked?

Where else might Toad Hall have been correctly supposed to be a country pub near Guisborough?

Last Sunday at Middleton Tyas Village Hall, the Library Theatre Company – just four of them – performed The Wind in the Willows: the Musical for an audience of a couple of dozen. We paid £6 each, the bairns half as much. No matter that Kenneth Grahame’s ageless book is essentially a Rite of Spring, it was wonderful.

Badger might have been played by Arnold Ridley, so elderly his embodiment. Toad, vibrantly, might have been Alastair Sim but was, in truth, Michael Brooksbank.

Ratty was Jane Collins, Moley played by Debbie Kelly. Handley Moule, an early 20th century Bishop of Durham, was known to the ungodly as Holy Mouley. (This may not strictly be relevant.)

They gathered, changed and worked the music in the village hall kitchen. “It’s difficult enough for two people to wash and dry in there, never mind all that,” said the Lady of This House, presumably from experience.

The village shop is also part of the hall. At the interval they raided the freezer and sold Magnums and things. It may not have been a Magnum opus but it was a delightful little diversion which brought much happiness, and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?