You just can't help believing in Ian

It was at Prestwich airport in Ayrshire and the journalist whose contacts got him the good old fashioned scoop - a world exclusive, they'd call it nowadays - was Ian Nelson, then a Daily Mailman in Scotland.

A quarter of a century ago he applied to run the Northern Echo's Redcar office, was gently asked by the then editor if he weren't too old to be starting again, but got the job.

At the time he was said to bear a marked resemblance to Col Sanders, the Kentuckan who fries chickens. Until Monday, when there was a knock on this door, he'd never again been in head office.

Ian's retired now but still helps cover the east Cleveland area for the Darlington and Stockton Times - penny-a-line they used to call it in the sixties, and the rate may not greatly have increased.

On Monday lunchtime he'd popped out for a few things from the shops and to post his weekly copy. He remembered the shops but forgot - "a senior moment," says Ian, using the modern euphemism - to send his news parcel. When he remembered, the bank holiday collection had gone.

Never one to miss a deadline, or to let down a news editor, Ian then caught a train from Saltburn, walked from Darlington station to our town centre offices, waited patiently for someone with a pass key to let him in, climbed several flights for a quick word ("I know how busy you are") and was back on the next train to Saltburn.

The question about how many younger men would have done it - Bank Holiday Monday or any other - need hardly be asked. A great Briton like the sea lord whose name he shares, Ian Nelson is 83.

A reader, asking only to be known as That Bloody Woman Again, draws attention to a piece by Lynne Truss in the Daily Telegraph on the pitfalls of punctuation.

"I think you and the lady should get together in an e-mail sort of way," says the BW.

Ms Truss is so punctilious about punctuation that after a series of Radio 4 programmes - called Cutting A Dash - she is now writing a book on some of the more heinous offences, and in particular the "outrageous" misuse of the apostrophe.

In some parts of the Civil Service, she says, staff are encouraged to ignore the apostrophe altogether because no one knows where it should be in the first place.

"I say it is time to draw a line in the sand," she insists and may have a point, full or otherwise.

Yet more urgently needed, however, is the Society for Cliche Recission And Prohibition, to be known as SCRAP.

It could begin with drawing a line in the sand.

SCRAP is an acronymn, a word formed from the initial letters of others. MASH, Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, is among the better known. Another rather splendid example was detailed in the Telegraph a few pages after Ms Truss's well punctuated piece.

Deep in Boulby potash mine, a mile beneath the Cleveland coast, a team of 30 scientists is working shifts to try to explain the origin and existence of "dark matter."

In short, in very short, it appears that 90 per cent of the universe may not be accounted for - but is probably composed of weakly interacting massive particles, around since the Big Bang and more familiarly knowns as WIMPS.

"WIMPS," says the Telegraph, "are as feeble as they sound."

Readers may have favourites of their own. An EIEIO, memory half suggests, was an Engineering Information Offiver something or other at the BBC.

The lady of this house, once a BBC staffer herself, insists that when a new seat of higher education was proposed for the Portsmouth area, the plan was to call it the South Hampshire Institute of Technology.

Eventually aware of the acronymic possibilities, they changed it to Portsmouth University instead.

...and finally back to Bank Holiday Monday, standing room only on a homeward bus overflowing with well behaved youngsters with an average age of 16. None offered a seat.

Like Ian Nelson the column has seen younger days but remains youthful in the mirror. Thanks, kids, we can stand for it a bit longer yet.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.htm

Published: 07/05/2003