Gadfly

Peter Hale in Scorton, near Richmond, was reminded of the Irish learner driver asked by the examiner what a single yellow line meant.

"Ah to be sure," he said, "it's no parking at all."

And what, continued the examiner, did a double yellow line mean?

"To be sure," said the L-driver, "no parking at all, at all."

SERENDIPITY - the knack of making happy discoveries - is without doubt a columnist's most essential tool. Here is the latest, luckiest, evidence.

Recent Gadfly columns have recalled the maiden Commons speech by Jimmy Murray, MP for Spennymoor from 1942-50 and for NW Durham from 1950-55, in which he lamented the shortage of dum-tits in Meadowfield Co-op.

Though goodness knows its meaning seems obvious enough, the word "dum-tit" caused considerable consternation among those under 40 or born on the southern shore of the Tees.

Two Sundays ago, meanwhile, the At Your Service column attended a memorable centenary service at Station Town Methodist Church and fell thereafter to a little exploration of Station Town's social sidings.

Among the library cuttings was an Echo story from February 1977 in which the licensee of the Corner House Hotel in Station Town - next to Wingate, in east Durham - was fined £20 for serving alcohol after hours. The polliss had raided at 11.20pm.

Mr William Smith, defending at Peterlee magistrates court, said that the pub landlord had been worried, if he stopped selling, about a disturbance from customers linked to a bunch of locally feared hard nuts.

They were known - bairns' lives, honest - as the Dum-tit Gang. What baby faced villains were they, then?

It's possible that those concerned may have spit out their dummies by now. Is any of them big enough to explain how the terror of Station Town came by so strangely soothing a soubriquet?

THESE days they no longer just have the polliss, they have multi-agency initiatives. They no longer have delinquency, they have anti-social behaviour.

An example of the former against the latter was launched in Shildon last week. Somewhat strangely, they called it Operation Axenic.

"Axenic", says the Oxford English, is a biological term meaning "a living organism that is free from all other demonstrable organisms... a species free of any life apart from that produced by its own protoplasm".

Are the Shildon lads really mad axenic men? We should probably be told.

WE have also been discussing Doggarts' stores, not least the familiar and thinly veiled County Durham threat to bare the backside in the company's commodious windows.

The headquarters was in Bishop Auckland. The first shop opened there in 1895 and was last to close, 86 years later. "I cannot count how many times I have heard the phrase 'Bishop hasn't been the same since Doggarts left'," says Derek Toon, now the town centre manager.

Derek, 56, was a Ferryhill lad, most of his clothes bought on Doggarts' clubs.

The family firm had expanded throughout the region. When Doggarts' "super-store" opened in Peterlee in 1968 - double knitting wool a shilling an ounce, terylene net curtains 1/6d a yard, Hoovermatic washing machines £59 19s 6d - it was the 14th branch.

Closure of the remaining ten stores was announced in November 1980, the third generation Doggart family management blaming the recession and increased wages and overheads. It cost 340 jobs.

Derek Toon accepts that they will never recreate Doggarts but would love to find some way of commemorating the faded phenomenon - perhaps by a dummy window, or a display in the town's Discovery Centre.

Do any Doggart family members survive? Shop talk, we'd love to hear from them.

SHOPPING habits have changed, of course, as the Doggart family discovered. With ill-concealed incredulity the Internet reproduces a letter to her local paper from Debra Hails - any relation to the right reverend Ron? - in Hartlepool.

"I was waiting at customer services at Asda and the woman in front was returning a disposable barbecue. When asked why, she replied that when she opened it, there was no meat in it.

"The shop assistant patiently explained that the barbecue was simply to cook the meat, and didn't include it. The customer looked very embarrassed indeed.

"The assistant looked at the receipt, noted that there were three barbecues on it, and asked if she was returning the other two. 'I can't,' said the woman, 'they're in the freezer'."

YET more none-so-blind alleys following the continuing debate about passages, snickets and the like. Peter Crawforth in Chilton, near Ferryhill, says that thereabouts they're simply known as cuts - "Chilton folk always were a cut above the rest" - while Pete Winstanley, near Chester-le-Street, reckons that in his Purley childhood, they were twittens.

Purley's in Surrey, only famous (says Pete) for the Orchid Ballroom, where television used to Come Dancing.

David Short in Durham notes that the new Weatherspoon's pub in the city has a notice advising that disabled access is "down the ginnel" while in South Street, not half a mile away, entrance to flats is said to be "through the vennel".

What, wonders David, will foreigners or non-locals make of all that?

WENDY Acres in Darlington (to whom apologies for earlier misspellings of her surname) sends extracts from a 1986 volume called The Snickleways of York, a term now in fairly common use within those walls.

The word, admit authors Mark and Ann Jones, is simply their corruption of "snicket", "ginnel" and "alleyway", all of which may mean the same.

A friend in rural North Yorkshire, however, has told them that a "snickle" is the same as a snare. ""Let's be clear," they write, "poaching in the snickleways is neither intended nor encouraged nor likely to be very successful."

Among a snickleway's essentials is that it's meant to be a way through from one place to another. So the column moves on...

...and finally, a characteristically generous note from the Rev Harry Lee, retired former vicar of Holy Trinity, in Darlington, of Medomsley and of Brompton, near Northallerton.

"Your researches into the local turns of speech would do justice to a university degree," says Mr Lee, now in Consett.

Continuing the theme, he notes that his County Durham-born mother was given to the phrase "as hard as hummer" - prompting him to wonder what hummer might be.

Though Harry couldn't possibly know, other readers may also be able to suggest what's so particularly hard about the hobs of hell.

Amid weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, the column returns next week.

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