Five months before its last Amen, 12 days before Christmas, the world’s oldest Methodist chapel in continuous use held its final coffee and carols service last Tuesday.

Like Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, and in more ways than one, they saved the best till last.

The wondrous little chapel’s at Newbiggin, between Middleton-in-Teesdale and High Force, built in 1760 and several times visited by John Wesley (who wasn’t as fond of the dales as the Northumbria Tourist Board might have wished.)

“Coffee and carols” is slightly misleading. It’s coffee and carols and mince pies and sausage rolls and shortbread and goodness knows what else beside, borne in glad and seemingly endless array from the little room at the back of the tiered chapel. Coffee and calories, perhaps.

The service is as nostalgic as a John Betjeman poem, the toast of Christmas past, the chapel no less nostalgically chocker.

We’ve attended several times previously. On the first occasion, recalls the ever-faithful June Luckhurst, the minister exhorted the congregation not to throw mince pies because the man from The Northern Echo was present.

Now the column’s so familiar that a seat and large print hymn book are customarily reserved in a corner at the back.

It proves to be the naughty corner: we printed the wrong start time – 10 30 not 10 45. “Blame the press,” says Bev Hollings, the minister – as has happened since Herod’s day – as one or two latecomers squeeze in.

Many are from old farming families. The flocks can watch themselves for an hour or two.

Bev, button bright, also employs computer animation. Though Wesley himself was known to get pretty animated – perhaps never more than on the infamous occasion when they turned out Barnard Castle fire brigade in an attempt to cool his ardour – it’s a preaching tool that he may never have envisaged.

Wherever her ministry takes her, adds Bev, she’ll always remember Newbiggin’s coffee and carols. “Only Teesdale folk can sing and eat mince pies simultaneously.”

Regulars have been invited to choose a carol, old favourites and some less well known. In the Bleak Mid-winter is, for once, not wholly appropriate. In Teesdale, timelessly tranquil Teesdale, the morning’s just bleak-ish.

Still piled plates process. The glad tidings may be of Christmas, but the sub-plot’s the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

The last, last carol comes around. Joy to the World, the canon’s finest and most coruscating, has months earlier been earnestly requested by the itinerant journalist – “We haven’t forgotten you, Mike” says the minister – and is eagerly and exuberantly essayed.

Newbiggin chapel’s closing service is on May 24 next year. Neither Christmas nor Christendom will be the same without it.

ends

Directly from the mince pie fest at Newbiggin to the senior citizens’ lunch at the Black Horse in Tudhoe, Spennymoor, an occasion at once enlightened by landlord Chris Hill’s jumper.

It’s one of those jolly jobs with flashing fairy lights, so magnificent that the mayor might be invited each year to switch it on.

Chris and his wife Susan represent that much endangered species of landlord who believe in a true community pub, in giving and not just taking.

The Saturday previously they’d raised £1100 from an event in aid of Coxhoe-based Stray Aid which, it should be stressed, looks after dogs and has nothing to do with those of us summoned from the highways and byways for Tuesday’s festivities.

It’s a splendid annual occasion, all of us qualifying by means of seniority. In the bar, the licensed equivalent of outer darkness, the young uns can be heard weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.

The column’s been invited these past five years, a three course meal supplemented by a visit from a particularly munificent and otherwise serially unemployed Santa and by a couple of turns from singer Chris Atkins who each year (for it’s a Christmas tradition) tells the one about where Kylie Minogue gets her kebabs.

Jason’s doner van.

At one point he invites his audience to click fingers. “It’s a bit difficult with the old arthur,” says a chap in a Santa hat. No matter how greatly the computer insists upon it, old arthur – spectre at the feast – should not be dignified with a capital, not even at Christmas time.

In another incarnation, Chris belongs to a slightly sepulchral band called Spooky Jefferson’s Ideal Lunch Box, who may not sing When a Child is Born so sonorously. For us oldies, the most risqué rendition is that Ring of Fire – it’s a Johnny Cash song – is dedicated to those who suffer from piles.

All that’s slightly disconcerting is that, even at senior citizens’ parties, the old folk are starting to look young – and the oldest’s 96. Another three courses ensure that the glad tidings, and the waistline, are spread further once again.

ends

What is it with these Christmas jumpers, anyway? Wikipedia records a 2011 survey that 41 per cent of Englishmen owned at least one, a figure which by the following year had jumped to 56 per cent and may by now be all-enveloping.

The singers Andy Williams and Val Doonican are credited with their early popularity, followed by Giles Brandreth, Timmy Mallett and Gordon the Gopher.

Gordon the Gopher, especially.

As other social occasions demand black tie, or whatever, the Co Durham Age UK men’s breakfast last Wednesday requires Christmas jumper – some of them flashy and fairy-lit, like Chris Hill’s the day before, few what might be supposed tasteful.

Such extravagance has its drawbacks. One of the guys can’t switch his jumper off again. “Anyone know an electrician?” he asks.

We’ve written of the monthly Age UK breakfasts before, ever-convivial but never so greatly as when a whiff of frankincense is in the air.

Seventeen, probably a record, assemble in the upstairs café at Durham Indoor Market. Any more, someone says, and they’d have to hire bouncers.

It’s impossible, of course, for elderly men to get together – even at Christmas – without comparing sick notes. Diabetes seemed a particular affliction.

“I wouldn’t care,” says a chap recently diagnosed with Type 2, “until that happened I thought Sugar Diabetes was a middleweight from Bradford.”

There’s a quiz and a best jumper award, chocolate prizes supplied by a local supermarket. “We told them you were a bunch of poor old men who might get nothing else all Christmas,” says the Age UK lady.

Afterwards the assiduous go shopping and the perfidious to Wetherspoons, where gentlemen rest merrily. The morning adds another thousand calories to the substantial intake of the 24 hours which preceded it. Christmas is coming, and not just the goose that’s getting fat.

Joy to the world, regardless.