GRIST to the mill, or midden as the case may be, last week's column recalled midnight mailmen - the night shift, as it were - and other infragrant euphemisms. The response was properly cautious.

The midnight mailmen, or honey carts - daisy carts in Gillian Wootten's fondly recalled childhood - were the chaps who did the dirty work, and always after everyone else had gone to bed.

It is important, therefore, that we tread carefully.

Brian Madden, once in Darlington and now in the US, recalls a similar operation in his childhood - employed by his father to follow the Store horse so that the muck might invigorate the old man's roses.

As recently as last week's St Patrick's Day parade in New York, the NBC television commentator remarked upon the men with the honey buckets following the horses.

As bairns they must similarly have walked miles, Brian recalls, and for threepence a bucketful. "I'll bet," he says, "that these so-and-so's over here get a canny bit more than threepence."

SUCH fundamental matters transported Malcolm Mackenzie back to the Second World War, when he and his mum used to stay in Mickleton, Teesdale, with the Raine family.

"Apart from my first view of High Force, all I remember was the delicious fried bread, prepared in several inches of lard by the lady of the house, and the outside netty."

Thereafter, Malcolm's e-mail becomes a little whimsical, principally involving rhubarb. Suffice that when the plant was matured, or manured, the leaves overshadowed the entire street and the bairns played hide and seek in the branches.

TOM Dockerty, aged 69 - Quaking Houses lad married Twizell lass - e-mails with similar trepidation, and with a parchment effect. (www.incredimail.com offers it free, he subsequently explains.)

The Gadfly reply was the second e-mail he'd ever had. He still needs to tighten up his margins, though.

His father-in-law, at any rate, was Tommy Dawson, chairman of Beamish Workmen's Club in the 50s and 60s and in great demand for his party piece, Dan, Dan the Sanitary Man.

Tom, perhaps fortunately, can only remember the first verse, the one about Dan finding a threepenny bit in the amid his working environment.

Those wishing a rendition can find Tom in Darlington covered market. Appropriately, he runs the perfume counter.

THERE'S a splendid history of the North Eastern Co-op with several pictures of Store horses in their pure bred pomp. Sadly, the book seems permanently to have been loaned; for reasons which will shortly become obvious, they'll have to use a photograph of the Liver Birds or of Tony Hancock instead.

John Briggs, coincidentally, has been looking up the origin of the equine term gee-gee, which took him back to the 16th century word "ree" - meaning "right."

Eventually it became a corrupted form of "go", childishly doubled up - as, for example, in bow-wow and kitty-cat.

In the Co-operative Society they remained Store horses, a synonym for stout dependability. If anyone else has a Store horse photograph, they'd really be pulling their weight

IN wondering, via Tranmere Rovers fan Steve Wilson, if Liverpool and Birkenhead were the only places in the world where an ice-lolly was called a lolly-ice, last week's column may have suggested that all concerned were Scousers.

Tranmere cries foul.

Customarily, says Steve, visiting football fans chant "We hate Scousers" when visiting Tranmere (who play in Birkenhead, a ferry across the Mersey away from Liverpool

Impishly, Rovers fans chant "We hate Scousers" back - "Confuses them no end," says Steve, who also suggests an anagram for embattled Sheffield United manager Neil Warnock.

Readers must work it out for themselves.

JOHN Dryden points out that lolly-ice is common across both Birkenhead and Liverpool, as is "jigger-rabbit" for cat.

His friend Steve Wilson, he says, has often been heard to remark: "What's the matter with you, jigger-rabbit got your lolly-ice?"

John was born and raised in Whitby, where his father was given to describing folk from far flung places as "Ruswarp lads" - Ruswarp being the village a mile up the road (which once, memory suggests, sold Yorkshire's best pork pies.)

True Liverpool lads, says John, tend to refer to Birkonians as Woollybacks - "or in the case of a recently encountered taxi driver, Welsh."

IN vain, last week's column sought a copy of First Aid in English, the primary guide to grammatical well being much used in the fundamental fifties.

Unable to help - "though I'd quite like a copy for the grandchildren" - Margaret Borthwick also recalls a school book in her 1940s infancy called The Grammatical Kittens (or baby jigger-rabbits, as it may have been around Aintree.)

She told her father that it was The Rheumatical Kittens, a misunderstanding which so confused her dear old dad - and the book shop which tried to order it - that Margaret never got a copy yet.

FOR some, of course, the need for solecistic sticking plaster is greater than others. The Spring issue of The Donor, quarterly magazine of the National Blood Service, has just landed on Ian Forsyth's doormat in Durham. There's also a contents review, e-mailed here in monochrome but originally printed in white on a tasteful blood red background. "The donation review gets ready to role out," it says.

Anthony Aloysius Hancock, Britain's best remembered blood donor, would have approved Ian's e-mail heading. "The death of literacy, episode 371," it says.

DIALECT is different; owt gans. The Durham and Tyneside Dialect Group Newsletter (per Ian Andrew in Lanchester) reports that there's now a free monthly magazine called Newcastle Stuff in which the Charver Dictionary column explains words like waxa, ladgeful, radgee and monged.

Since all but radgee - as in radgee gadgee - are hitherto unheard of hereabouts, and since the spellcheck needs the exercise, more erudite readers may care to translate.

The Dialect Newsletter is also seeking printable North-East terms for inebriation, as in palatick, suggests a little research but declines to offer expenses. The same applies here.

...and finally back to euphemisms, and news in The Guardian that Vauxhall aren't closing their Luton plant - as the newly unemployed had supposed - merely undertaking a "volume related production schedule adjustment."

Chrysler is similarly philanthropic - sackings have become a "career alternative enhancement program."

Unless such alternative enhancements swiftly present themselves, the column returns next week.

Published: 27/03/2002