A MAN of whom truly it might be said that he was once seen and never forgotten, the Rev Roly Bain has died. He was 62.

Sometimes he called himself Holy Roly, a clown priest with a monocycle, a great Dane of a dog collar and a nice line in deprecation.

“I look lousy in sequins. I’d never make a bishop,” he once told the column.

Though not of the North-East, he was greatly familiar here. When we saw him at Kirklington, near Bedale, one wintry evening in 2001, he’d spent the day – just visiting – at Durham jail. “It’s a wonderful achievement if you can make a prisoner laugh or cry,” he said.

He’d also taken part in the 240th anniversary celebrations of Yarm Methodist church, an octagonal building which John Wesley – of whom today’s column will hear more – thought “by far the most elegant in England.”

Bain wrote best-selling books like Playing the Fool and Fools Rush In, spoke – neatly – of clowning glory.

He was also adept at biblical limericks, like the one about Zacharias (aka Zaccheus), the short-changed tax collector who shinned a tree to get a better view of Jesus.

Zacharias of diminutive stature

Was reduced to a state of high rapture,

He climbed up a tree

Took our Lord home to tea,

And gave back more taxes than Thatcher.

In 1994, he was named Clown of the Year. As once was said of James I, he may have been the wisest fool in Christendom.

ZACCHEUS, says Mark’s gospel, could not come nigh unto Jesus for the press. It’s a useful line.

Zaccheus was also the name of a chihuahua, they being a pretty small dog, first encountered at 6am one Easter Day on Middlehope Common, high at the top end of Weardale. Methodist-led, it was what the churches call a dawn service, bright but perishing and with the invigorating promise of hot cross buns thereafter.

“Trees being in short supply on Middlehope Common,” we wrote, “Zaccheus pokes a cautious head from a carrying basket in which he is probably a great deal warmer than the rest of us.”

Since clearly he is an ecumenical chihuahua – two words which may never previously have appeared in sequence – Zaccheus was also a regular at St Catherine’s CofE in Crook, to which clings coincidence.

ON a recent visit to St Cath’s, we pick up a parish magazine – 50p, bargain – and via a page of frightening fascination are at once transported back to the top of the dale.

It’s June 1853. Henry J Slaley, Wesleyan Methodist minister for the Wolsingham circuit but based at High House chapel in Ireshopeburn, is not a happy clappy.

The very next day, it transpires, a young lady of his flock is to marry a Primitive Methodist. The minister’s letter to her had been obtained by the Durham Chronicle, which headlined it “The Pope of Wolsingham”.

If the wedding goes ahead, writes Slaley, the couple must expect to suffer “either in this world or the next, or both”.

It waxes yet more fearsome. “Either protracted bodily affliction, or poverty, or persecution, or some other temporal calamity, or a premature grave, or an eternal hell will inevitably follow the breach of that divine command ‘Be not equally yoked together with unbelievers’.”

Marry, he adds, and the bride will be expelled from the Society. “Request all your friends to purchase mourning, and to put it on on the day you are married.”

The Wesleyan and Primitive Methodist churches were themselves united, mostly joyfully, in 1932. The Ireshopeburn bride lived happily ever after.

IT was at an Easter morning service in Durham Cathedral that first I heard the hymn This Joyful Eastertide, sung gloriously by the choir.

Coincidence high columned upon coincidence, Peter Sotheran – near Redcar – sends the second verse, spotted by his church organist daughter, but for a rather different reason.

My flesh in hope shall rest,

And for a season slumber,

Till trump from east to west

Shall wake the dead in number.

“I wondered,” adds Peter, “if the staunch hymn singers among your readership are aware of any other hymns which reflect on the current political situation.”

PETER SOTHERAN, perchance, received his MBE on the same Buckingham Palace morning in 2006 that I collected mine. Ahead of us both in chivalry’s pecking order was BHS boss Philip Green – then knighted, now benighted.

Our two boys watched. Still at university, the younger one wore suit, shirt and tie which together had cost £70 and were complemented by black socks which officially were his referee’s kit.

His brother spotted the newly dubbed Sir Philip. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll ask him if he’ll give you a new suit.” He won’t now, will he?

BETTER late than never, as an obituarist might suggest, The Times last Tuesday carried an obit on prominent North-East landowner Sir Anthony Milbank, who died on July 3.

Sir Anthony, greatly popular, lived at Barningham, near Barnard Castle, where part of the village cricket field is in Durham and part in North Yorkshire.

As a National Serviceman with the Coldstream Guards, however, he shared the family’s grace and favour apartment at St James Palace, to which he invited the celebrated American actress Jayne Mansfield for tea with a promise that she, like Peter Sotheran, would get to meet the Queen.

In the event – lusty meets busty – all she encountered was a number of ogling guardsmen.

Sir Anthony, said The Times, particularly incurred the wrath of Mikey Hargitay, Mansfield’s husband. Hargitay was better known as Mr Universe.

SIR Tim Kitson, happily, is still very much with us – now 85, living in Wensleydale and recalled in a new biography of Sir Edward Heath. Heath, a Prime Minister to whom the term “curmudgeonly” seemed oft to be applied, was so unpopular with his backbenchers that Kitson – MP for Richmond and his parliamentary private secretary – begged him to buy some of the lads a beer.

A few days later, Sir Tim was delighted to see his boss with a fellow MP in the bar and edged forward to catch the conversation. “That was a bloody awful speech you gave today,” said Ted.

...AND finally, David Walsh spots that last week’s rocket explosion at Cape Canaveral also destroyed a satellite called Amos 6 – its mission to take Facebook to the remoter parts of sub-Saharan Africa. “Just imagine if it had not been frazzled,” says David. “In a week’s time traders in spices, silk and damask from Timbuktu and other fabled centres could have relaxed in the Caravanserai looking at pictures of cats, half-eaten meals in Toby Carveries, mutts and drunken revels in Ibiza.”

With only collateral damage, Amos 1 returns next week.