SEARCHING last Thursday for something else entirely, we discovered in the Echo of October 19, 1966, a report of angry reaction to Newcastle City Council's plan to appoint its first press and public relations officer, at an annual salary of £2,700. Almost 40 years later, there's a small army of them.

Last Thursday's papers themselves carried a report that the £270,000 concrete sculpture installed just six years ago in front of the Haymarket is to go.

Officially it was called Shoulder to Shoulder, weary council tax payers called the monstrosity The Legomen.

It took the city council cabinet member for culture to explain that if sculptor Ray Smith didn't want to take it back, it would be disposed of "in the most effective way".

"I think that as a piece of artwork in a different place, people might have appreciated it more," added Coun David Faulkner.

The press office wasn't quoted at all. The spokesmen were probably speechless.

PERHAPS the most interesting thing about that day's paper 39 years ago, however, was the two-thirds of a page devoted to a speech by Ernest Marples, the shadow minister of technology.

It concerned computers, then little known or understood. Most newspapers had ignored it or found two paragraphs at the bottom of the page; across eight columns the Echo headlined it "The speech that everyone ought to read."

Alongside was a photograph of a girl with a computer at the Paton and Baldwins factory in Darlington. It looked a bit like a pre-war manual telephone exchange.

Marples is better remembered as the elementary school boy from Manchester who as transport minister introduced yellow lines, breath tests, the totting-up procedure, parking meters and seat belts. It was he who commissioned Dr Beeching's report on the future of the railways.

In August 1964, to date things a bit, he had visited the Tyne Tunnel excavations, inspected work on the "Darlington motorway" - greeted by protestors against the closure of the North Road railway workshops - and inaugurated the Greatham bypass, near Hartlepool.

As postmaster general, he had earlier introduced subscriber trunk dialling and started the Premium Bond scheme. The acronym for the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment appears to have been coincidental.

His speech on technological change may have been the most remarkable of all. "The computer is extending man's brain power and decision making capacity in the same way that steam power extended and replaced muscle power," he said.

"By the turn of the century, paper records will be no more."

It said an awful lot for the oft-maligned Ernie Marples - and a great deal, too, for the editor of The Northern Echo.

ONCE bitten, recent notes on midges - especially the scurrilous Scottish sort - prompt a call from John Burton, the Prime Minister's constituency agent in Sedgefield.

John recalls the occasion that he and his wife Lily were invited to stay with Lord Irvine, then the Lord Chancellor, at his place on the Mull of Kintyre.

Though Paul McCartney never thought to mention it, the Mull (says John) is absolutely terrible for midges. "I was bitten all over the place, Lily wasn't bitten at all.

"I was in serious trouble and she was strutting about like nothing was going on. Next morning, Gerry Irvine asked what we'd been drinking."

John had been on red wine, his wife on whisky and lemon. That was the answer, said their learned friend, midges just didn't like whisky.

John took the counsel on board, returned home to Trimdon, thought he'd better start drinking Scotch. Since then, he's never been bitten by a midge.

That there are no midges in Trimdon is, he says, wholly irrelevant. He's keeping to the preventative medicine, anyway.

FLYING by night, last week's column also recorded the advice given by the railway inquiry website to a traveller hoping to get to Carlisle by leaving Middlesbrough at 8pm.

The proposed route was Middlesbrough-Northallerton-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow-Carlisle, including five overnight hours between stations in Glasgow.

"They don't usually have midges in the capital," we'd consoled, "not in the wee small hours anyway."

Ian Andrew in Lanchester quotes the Broons. "Help, ma Boab," he writes, and writes - apropos of the earlier note - is still the word. "So far as I'm concerned," says Ian, "the Internet is still something from where the Milan goalie retrieves the ball."

Spot the error? A capital offence, undoubtedly.

FURTHER to last week's note on all the changes in Darlington town centre, we bump in the queue for the last bus into a chap with very personal reasons for opposing further fiddling with the High Row.

"My grandfather was fined ten shillings for driving a horse and cart up those steps while drunk," he says.

"It must have been 1913-14. I still have the certificate, family heirloom. It's dreadful that they're planning to do away with them."

He points towards the High Row, memories of his grandad's horse and cart still hawking round his head, demands that something be done. "That," he protests, "is history."

AMONG the benefits of playing slow and loose with Darlington's bus stops is that there are new shop windows into which to gaze while awaiting the feckless flyer.

For years the homeward bus left from outside a coach company office, the posters which festooned the window detailing economical exploration ever further into Europe. Lisbon may have held the record.

The greater fascination, however, was what became known as "Turkey and tinsel" weekends. Every year they'd leave earlier, the record standing at October 26 when they moved the bus stop. Christmas comes early in Llandudno.

These days, the bus leaves from outside a hairdresser's and body wax parlour, the available options including lip wax (£5), air brush tattooing (from £4) and, for £17, something called a shoeshine.

It seems unlikely to replace twopennorth of elbow grease and a dab of Cherry Blossom.

SIMILARLY off his trolley, Steve Jones in Darlington sends the timetable for the number 22 Arriva service from the town centre to Minors Crescent. He picked it up on the bus two days before the new routes began. The 22, it said, would leave from outside the Queens Head pub on Tubwell Row.

Then Steve looked at the map published by the council and printed in the Echo. The 22, it said, left 300 yards away in Crown Street.

"It's little wonder there's confusion," he says. "Who are we to believe, the council or the bus company?"

At risk of being knocked down by all the buses now thronging Priestgate, the column has undertaken a little investigative journalism. The bus leaves from Crown Street. Minors matters maybe, but driving Darlington to distraction.

...and finally, Barry Wood in Edmondsley emails to ask where on earth you'd find a legless spider.

Exactly where you left it.

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