WIND Mill is a half-hidden hamlet formerly known as Pit Green, near the A68 in west Durham. Its Methodist chapel – small, square, wholly wholesome and wonderfully welcoming – opened in 1869.

These columns have several times attended harvest thanksgiving, not least for the spread which follows. On Sunday, a festive indulgence, we turned up for the Christmas service and were greeted like the Prodigal Son – and, on this occasion, his wife.

About 30 are present, outnumbering the entire population. Most are said to be related in some way to Joyce Simpson, the chapel steward.

The sun’s bright, the mid-December temperature 13C, a splendid rainbow over breezy Weardale. “Last week at this time we had a foot of snow,” says Joyce.

Ruth Dent, leading the service, is wonderfully effective. When she talks of things being great, which is quite often, she sounds a bit like Tony the Tiger.

Ruth also asks the attendant children what was the number on their Advent calendars that morning. They know at once. How many more sleeps until the big day? Five, they chorus as one.

She might also have told the joke, the one we’d heard on the Last Legs walk to Ryhope the day previously, about the chap taken to court for stealing an Advent calendar from Tesco. He got 24 days.

It’s lovely, traditional, carefully crafted and inclusive – a reminder that Christmas and all that it brings are with us once again, and no matter that harvest tea is replaced by coffee and biscuits. What goes around comes around, as probably they say in Wind Mill.

AMONG those on parade at Wind Mill is 92-year-old former Royal Navy man George Brown, somewhat belatedly awarded the Legion d’Honneur at a ceremony in Durham Cathedral the other day for his heroics in the Second World War.

Still as smart as a carrot, born in Howden-le-Wear but now in Hunwick, near Crook, George was on one of the first boats in on D Day. “Twenty of us, six sailors and the rest Canadians,” he recalls.

So what was it like? “Oh I think you might say hell on earth,” says George, who drives the 16-mile round trip to Wind Mill because he likes the little chapel so much.

A bit like the liberated French, he thought that the Echo had overlooked him. No chance: like our friends across the Channel, we salute him, too.

AN unfestive note, perhaps – but see today’s final paragraph – Peter Jeffries comes across a splendid 1970 volume called the Good Jail Guide, a sort of penal TripAdvisor. Like some of its old lags, Durham comes out badly.

“Rather a bleak place. Food, winter and staff on the chilly side,” the guide informs. “Not much to do here and too small a yard for the evening stroll.”

Prisons are referred to as hotels, inmates as guests. Durham had 1,000 “ordinary” guests and 50 of the “extraordinary” sort, those housed in the supposedly escape-proof E-wing.

That grim old establishment, it’s noted, was also the only prison other than Dartmoor where the Army had been called in. That was in 1965 when, memory suggests, the Chief Constable concluded that the IRA was about to bomb the place. They weren’t.

Guests had included Ian Brady, Walter “Angel Face” Probyn, Charles Edward Richardson, Ronnie Kray, William Vassall and, perhaps most notoriously, John McVicar, who escaped in 1968 and is said to have used a hamster on the end of a piece of string to measure the length of the tunnel he was digging.

Perhaps he just couldn’t stand the locals. “Not recommended, especially not for southerners,” the GJG concludes. “We are sorry to have to emphasise the point that northerners and southerners mix rather uneasily.”

SLIGHTLY out of earshot of HMP’s present Durham denizens, a brass trio played to the city’s festive shoppers last Tuesday. Silent Night and Good King Wenceslas seemed fine, but what of We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Here? The Big Meeting isn’t until July.

JOHN MCVICAR wasn’t the first person to go over the wall at Durham. That was Ronnie “Rubberbones” Heslop seven years earlier. Now affectionately remembered as a sort of Robin Hood figure, Ronnie was among conversation’s chief topics at the old folks’ Christmas lunch at the Black Horse in Tudhoe, near Spennymoor.

Rubberbones, Page Bank lad, blew safes – Co-ops a speciality. “He’d steal anything for anyone,” they said, affectionately.

An invitation to the lunch has become so much an annual tradition that I can almost – almost – remember being ineligible for reasons of youthfulness.

Landlord Chris Hill funds the whole convivial occasion – food, drink, entertainment – and there’s even a visit from a hugely authentic-looking Santa. That Santa bears considerable resemblance to these columns’ old friend Paul Hodgson, recalls the old gag about Father Christmas working just one day a year, save that even that’s one more than Hodgy.

Santa also told a rather risque joke about Superman’s Christmas party. Since it can’t be repeated here, readers must content themselves with one sent by a gentleman who in former times would have been known as a clerk in holy orders.

It’s Christmas Eve and an old Yorkshireman’s lying dying, not expected to make it through the night, when suddenly his senses are assailed by the unmistakeable aroma of freshly-baked scones.

Dismissing the idea that he might already have gone to heaven, he drags himself out of bed and with much effort descends the stairs, puts trembling hand on the kitchen door and sees a vast array of fresh golden goodies spread before him.

Near delirious, he lays shaking fingers on the nearest one and is at once whacked by his wife. “Get your thieving mitts off,” she says. “They’re for the bloody funeral.”

LAST week’s column on the Wilds of Wannie – “vintage Amos” writes a lady in Darlington kindly – was intrigued by the so-called Tree of Soles, or possibly soles, amid that Northumberland terrain.

It transpires, however, that that slightly macabre ash, hung with dozens of pairs of footwear, isn’t Wannie of a kind.

Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland discovers a 2009 Daily Telegraph story about another Tree of Souls in Buckinghamshire – an exercise funded by £265,000 of Heritage Lottery money said to be unable to explain its roots.

….and finally back, as indicated, to HM Prisons. Many years ago, essaying a series on how “others” would be marking Christmas, I asked a very old lag in Northallerton jail what he’d most miss about spending Christmas inside.

“Not being able to walk 100 yards in a straight line,” he said.

It’s a thought for the festive season. Happy Christmas.