NOT what you’d call a resident president, I retain that high office with the Wensleydale Writers group and thus felt obliged to put in appearance at the annual meeting at the Friends Meeting House in Leyburn. There’d been enough rejection slips.

Though the morning held promise of early spring, snow still clung to the hillsides. A county council plough drove by, unneeded, but on guard.

The group read some of their work. Though each pair takes eight to ten hours, Helen Weatherall had written engagingly on the myriad pleasures of knitting socks, a piece she’d called Put A Sock In It.

Change the header to Socks Appeal and she could sell it for £100 to The Oldie magazine, we suggested. Helen thought it a brilliant idea. That’s what presidents are for.

TOO soon for Helen’s hose who, the Oldie’s April edition still contains two items of particular interest. One is letters critical of poor old Peter Mullen, the other a piece by Lucinda Lambton on Britain’s grandest former piggery.

It’s a folly at Fyling Hall, near Robin Hood’s Bay, commissioned in the late 19th Century by Squire John Warren Barry as a home for his two porkers. Large whites, apparently.

His cows lived elsewhere, it should be explained, in a byre that bore a marked resemblance to a church, with stained glass windows and oak stalls which looked like pews.

The piggery took three men two years to build, its classical style apparently a mix of the Ionic, the Doric and the Tuscan. Though some wonder how the pigs got from field to sty – or even if they bothered it at all – Lucinda’s impressed.

“What a difference it would make if a fraction of the sensibility that Squire Barry put into his little sty was put unto today’s agricultural buildings which so often brutalise and not beautify the countryside,” she writes.

It’s now owned by the Landmark Trust, which lets unusual buildings as holiday homes. Few have been more talked about, it says, nor subject of more “feeble, but irresistible jokes".

“We hope we have made it acceptable, if not entirely draught proof, for a higher breed of inhabitants,” adds the Trust website.

The website also reveals that Matthew Hart, one of those charged with the piggery’s construction, was so ecstatic when finally it was completed that he danced a jig on the roof, fell off and broke his nose. That was folly, too.

ANOTHER porcine palace came to mind, the Old Piggery – for that, formally, is its name – owned in north Northumberland by Lord Walton of Detchant.

Born in Rowlands Gill, educated at Middlestone Moor juniors and at Alderman Wraith Grammar School in Spennymoor, John Walton became one of the worlds leading neurologists. We headed up there to see him and his wife, Betty, in August 2001.

“Manifestly they are greatly contented,” the column observed, “as happy as pigs in clarts, as probably they say in Northumberland, and every bit as at home.”

Even as old piggeries go, their future home had seen better days when first the Waltons viewed it. The windows were long shattered, swallows colonised the beams and the shepherd’s dogs had taken over the living quarters.

“It may sound rather quirky,” said Lord Walton, “but the old piggery is exactly what it was.”

Feebly, irresistibly, the column was headed “Lord of the sties”.

MAYBE coincidence, possibly not, the Sunday Times carries a letter from John Walton in Seahouses – just across the fields from Detchant – following the paper’s report of penguins airborne over the Farne Islands. Penguins, writes Mr Walton, are found only in the southern hemisphere – and, unlike pigs, might never fly at all.

OUR friends in the writers group are also compiling a Wensleydale anthology, though recent events involving Bro Clarkson at the Simonstone Hall Hotel might alone fill a volume or two.

Simonstone’s an interesting place, owned in the 1990s by John Jeffryes, a former Conservative candidate for Stockton South who also owned a private crematorium and cemetery in Golders Green.

Nor is the hotel wholly unfamiliar with whatever is the plural of fracas. When the Eating Owt column took Sunday lunch there in 2000, the 40 minute wait between main course and pudding was accompanied by the backdrop of an almighty hoo-hah in the kitchen.

It was tempting to join John Robinson, the Great Smeaton butcher, playing dominoes for 20p a corner in the next room.

Finally, someone emerged. The sous chef had walked out, it was explained. That’s the trouble with sous, the column observed, always on the warpath.

WE’D earlier eaten at Simonstone in 1990, the column inexplicably obliged to ask which celebrated crime fiction writer – whose centenary was marked that year – went Snap, crackle and pop. It was, of course, Agatha Krispie.

MUSICALLY they are nicknamed Old Folk Clubs, the jaunty afternoon sing-arounds of which we wrote so enthusiastically a few weeks back. There’s another spin-off.

John Irvine was in the same class at A J Dawson Grammar School in Wingate as Nick Fenwick, the singer/song writer who seems somehow to have been subsumed into the West Midlands.

Fifty years ago, Nick persuaded young Irvine and one or two others to back some Beatles songs for a school show. It was the last time that John appeared on stage – until this very night.

He’s chairman of the Durham Cricket League, played cricket for 40-odd years for Mainsforth and is clerk of Fishburn Parish Council. Successes notwithstanding, he always wanted to be back on stage – and particularly at Darlington Civic Theatre.

Tonight – extra admittedly, extra special undoubtedly – he’ll be part of the eight-strong “community ensemble” in the Arthur Miller play A View From the Bridge, playing a 1930s docker.

First there were the solo auditions, his imagined role to play someone looking for a lost item in a haversack. “I’d have offered to sweep the stage if they gave me a part,” says John, though he suspects that he may have landed the role because he was one of the few at audition who fitted the costume.

“Were all 1930s dockers old and overweight?”

He’s so keen that he even went to see the play in Nottingham a couple of Saturdays back, though it helped that the Boro were at Nottingham Forest the same day.

The play bill may not include him, nor the portico have his name in lights. It matters not. “It’s a lifetime’s ambition to be on stage at Darlington Civic. I wish I could tell Nick Fenwick: my big moment at last.”