FOR little better reason than that it is "Amos" backwards, last week's column noted that the words of the wonderful hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind are merely the last six verses of a 17 verse poem in praise of the hallucinogenic drug soma. David Walsh in Redcar offers a remarkable local connection.

Soma, he recalls, was the regulation drug in Aldous Huxley's classic 1932 novel Brave New World - a vision of a chemically controlled hell on earth.

Brave New World, adds David, is partly based on Billingham.

Huxley not only worked there for a short time as a young chemist before Brunner and Mond became ICI, but is said to have hailed Billingham as "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence".

A little more than coincidentally, the novel's "world controller" of Western Europe is a chap called Mustapha Mond.

Brave New World - its title pinched from a quote by Miranda in The Tempest - is what learned folk call dystopian, which is the opposite of Utopian.

Billingham, though named Britain's cheapest retail centre - something to do with all those pound shops, probably - also has a uniquely carbuncular town centre, long abandoned high rise ICI office blocks and a nightmare of a railway station where, with two young sons in tow, I was once stoned by a gang of locals simply for waiting for a train.

A recent survey on the "Crap towns" website repeated the claim, allegedly contained in an Ofsted report, that the town has one book for every ten homes.

The town otherwise, it added, was an overflow of soulless estates "inhabited by northern versions of Wayne and Waynetta Slob, juvenile miscreants attired in yellow and orange Kappa tracksuits and lads called Terry, Vince and Nigel who have mullets and rev up their B-reg Opel Mantas outside the ice rink in the vain hope of attracting girls".

Whether it is a brave new world, and whether Aldous Huxley saw it coming, is - of course - impossible to say.

PROBABLY as an example of what can happen if you don't stick in, the column was invited last week to join the question and answer panel confronting enthusiastic student journalists at Darlington College.

Someone wanted to know the hardest professional decision. It was taking that orange ten bob note from the golden wedding couple in Ferryhill, despite all the caveats in the code of conduct, in the emancipated days of Harold Wilson.

Darlington's now esteemed journalism courses must be approaching their 40th anniversary, because the column wasn't just on the first but finished, improbably, top of the class. The resultant £2 book token bought 16 Penguin paperbacks, among them Brave New World. Whatever happened to it?

MAURICE Heslop, Billingham lad and probably quite proud of it, is just back from his son's wedding in Thailand.

Collecting second leg boarding cards at Bangkok, he was surprised to find them still listed as Schipol to Teesside Airport.

"I asked the clerk where Teesside was, and he said in the north of England. I asked him where Durham Tees Valley was and he didn't have a clue."

At Schipol, he asked two KLM boarding staff if they'd heard of Durham Tees Valley. They hadn't, but were able very happily to point him towards the Teesside flight. This expensive name change may have lost rather more in the translation than the airport authorities would wish us to believe.

ENCLOSING a spirited defence of the allegedly recent practice of sending circular letters with the Christmas cards - "we received our first shortly after moving to Durham 40 years ago" - Daphne Clarke in Richmond also queries the use of the term "round robin" to describe them.

According to three different dictionaries, she says, a round robin was a petition or protest with the signatories in a circle so that none could be singled out as ringleader. She has made the same point to Woman's Hour.

The phrase meant something rather different in the 16th century, however, when the theologian John Calvin criticised lack of reverence for the sacraments. "Certayne fonde talkers applye to this mooste holye sacramente, names of despitte and reproche, as to call it Jake in the boxe, and round roben, and suche other not onley fonde but also blasphemous names."

Others suggest that it is a corruption of the French "ruban", meaning ribbon, and that 18th century French peasants would sign complaints about their lot in such a way because the first two or three would otherwise be beheaded.

A similar theory applied to the Royal Navy, except that British officers were much too civilised to behead insubordinate matelots.

They hanged them, instead.

WITH only one leg to stand on, last week's column also bewailed the obdurate ulcer which for two months has affected the inside ankle of the other.

Coincidentally, no more, the same day's paper also carried details of a three year, £750,000 clinical test by medics at York University into the benefits of applying maggots to such things.

There was even a picture of a tin of maggots, if not a can of worms. They eat dead tissue, thus cleaning wounds, it's claimed.

Though urged to do so by Anne Gibbon in Darlington and by Dorothy Charlton in Belmont, Durham, we have so far resisted the temptation to become a guinea pig for a maggot.

Dorothy also extols the benefits of Active Manuka Honey, said both to be good to eat and beneficial for leg ulcers, though only - it's stressed - under medical supervision.

Leg ulcers are said to affect one per cent of the population and to cost £600m a year to treat. The honey's £12.99 at health shops - "sounds a lot," says Dorothy, not unreasonably, "but if it manages to heal then it's worth its weight in gold."

SPEAKING of worms, if not on this occasion of maggots, we also noted the claim in The Times obituary of former Northern Echo sports editor Bob James that "if sufficiently primed" late at night, he could sing all 50 verses of The Lambton Worm by way of entertaining trainee journos.

Though the better known version of the legend still seems to have but six, Tom Purvis in Sunderland finds in Conrad Bladey's Beuk o' Newcassel Songs a variant on the Lambton legend with almost 100 - and a Lambton heir given to call the sacraments much worse than a mere round robin.

The most versatile of chaps, Bob probably knew all of those, an' all.

....and finally, we are grateful to the January newsletter of Harrowgate Hill Methodist church in Darlington for the thought for today: "God so loved the world that he didn't send a committee..."

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Published: ??/??/2004