FIRST an apology. A grovelling, fawning, knees-bent apology of the sort usually reserved for High Court and humble pie factory. Two weeks ago, a favour to a friend, we previewed a folk music evening at the Redworth Hall Hotel near Shildon in aid of worthy medical causes. One of the star turns, we said, was to be a French lass called Floosie.

It should, of course, have been Flossie. Let's just say that something was lost in the translation (and, bless her, she hadn't even noticed.)

Flossie Malavialle, born and raised in Nimes in southern France, arrived in Britain five years ago on a year's teaching exchange. She'd asked for Edinburgh, they sent her to Grangefield comprehensive, in Stockton.

"Maybe it was my accent," she supposes disingenuously. "Scotland, Stockton, perhaps they sounded the same."

She'd sung since she was 14, admired Edith Piaf but modelled herself on no-one, found teaching French in Stockton a bit of a culture shock.

"It was hell," she recalls over an old English pot of tea. "I was in the school in France for eight years and was respected, perhaps loved.

"Most of the kids in Stockton wanted to know what was the point of learning a foreign language when everyone spoke English, anyway. It could be quite difficult, a bit of a shock. I was having to start all over again, and it was hard work."

After spending another year in France, she returned to live in England, nonetheless. Flossie had discovered the folk music scene: today's column, in truth, is something of a folk festival.

"There are no folk clubs in France. The first time I attended one here I thought it was a sect. Everyone was sitting around in circles and in silence. I thought 'God almighty, what's going on here?' I was from outside, I didn't know."

Now she lives in Stanhope Road, Darlington - if not quite the old town's left bank, then perhaps its artists' quarter - still does supply teaching but is in growing demand as a singer.

"Music is the reason I came back, nothing else. Everyone says I must have someone here, but I have a boyfriend in France. I've always been independent, I just thought that if I didn't do it then, I never would.

"I'm not complaining. I'm enjoying it. As long as I have more gigs than the year before, I'm happy.

"It's a lot different from the south of France, but you can be miserable in the sun and happy in the rain. If you are doing something you like, that's the main thing."

Reviews talk of her comprehensively stealing the show, of her exhilarating voice, of "a treasure who will enchant you".

The programme for the Redworth Hall gig said she'd come to England to gain more direct experience of spoken English. "Where else would she go but Teesside?"

What's really unexpected isn't the lustrous voice or the accomplished guitar playing but that she has - or successfully employs, at any rate - a double knit North-East accent that could have been hewed down Shotton colliery.

"I love miserable songs, me," she tells her engrossed audience.

Redworth Hall loved her, too. Long dark hair cascading, she physically resembles a younger Joan Baez - Joan Bayeux, perhaps - admiring male glances a sort of cor franglais.

Musically she is eclectic, versatile, richly talented. If Piaf is forever the Little Sparrow, Malavialle is the Spuggie.

Can she, like Piaf, claim je ne regrette rien? "Oh yes, I absolutely love it here," says Flossie. "No regrets whatsoever."

* More details of Flossie and her four albums can be found at www.flossie-malavialle.co.uk or email malavialle@aol.com

A FOLK band called Fourum, Darlington teachers when 30 years ago they first struck up, shared the stage at Redworth Hall. They were boisterous and brilliant.

Jim Jack, Bob Hattersley, Sandy Still and Allen Miller - who writes most of their numbers - sing chiefly of the Yorkshire Dales, of Corpse Way and Gunnerside Ghyll, though some material is better known elsewhere and there's a splendid song about the Hartlepool monkey.

Jim Jack was head until fairly recently of Richmond School, in which capacity he had responsibility for the column's two sons. All three thrive; Fourum, too, are vibrant.

Goodbye to stand-alone Smailesey

STEPHEN Smailes, who died this week, had tilted for 38 years at the windmill that is a Labour controlled local authority in the North-East. He did it indomitably, incorrigibly and with very great charm.

Smailesey, as generally he styled himself, was a Tory on Stockton Council. Not even the dinosaur, one of these columns once observed, survived for so long in so hostile an environment.

He had an eye for a story and an ear for a quote. Thirty years ago he challenged the John North column to an Easter Monday walking race from the Cock of the North in Durham to the Red Lion in Darlington, the contest joined by fellow councillors Tony Moore, from Newton Aycliffe, and Jimmy Whelan, from Darlington.

All three are now dead. The Cock of the North's gone, too.

Among Stephen's more recent appearances hereabouts was in a column about the John H Amos - no relation - the elderly paddle tug once moored morosely on the Tees.

"If someone had taken it to a scrapyard," he observed scathingly, "they'd have come away with a goldfish in a bowl."

He'd been a bit of a cricketer - the first of Brian Milburn's six in six balls when Spennymoor II played Stockton III - and remained an avid dominoes man.

Last year, characteristically self-effacing, he rang to report that in the weekly four-hander at Stockton Cricket Club he'd not only lost all 29 hands but "last in the box" - on which he was a world authority - as well.

"It cost me £1.45," he complained. "As a Tory, it's money I can ill afford."

Periodically he'd also invite the column to join him and his cronies on the annual "Last of the Summer Wine" trip down the Esk Valley railway line. Now Stephen's glass is drained and many will miss him - a true character, a great councillor and an exceptionally nice man.

Return To Vin and vigour

VIN Garbutt, the most internationally celebrated of all North-East folk singers, is back on the road - a little gingerly - after two major operations in a month. The first, in March, was to repair a damaged heart valve. Three weeks later, the original op apparently successful, he suffered massive internal bleeding and was rushed back into the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough.

"That one was really terrible," he recalls. "I lost 50 per cent of my blood. Here's my poor heart, newly repaired, trying to work on half empty. The people at James Cook were brilliant."

Vin's worldwide reputation is so great that, while he recuperated in Middlesbrough, a benefit concert was being staged in Adelaide.

Though still taking things gently - "I sit down for concerts, I still lack a bit of stamina" - he and his friend Bob Fox launch their new album in front of a sell-out 400 audience at the Sage in Gateshead a week today.

"Oh aye, I've been to some posh places, me," says the 57-year-old who lives in Loftus, east Cleveland, has been singing professionally since 1969 - "36 years of successful anonymity" - and won the BBC Radio 2 folk award four years ago.

The album's called Persona...Grata, a reference - "You can make those dots stands for anything you want" - to those promoters who suppose his songs to be too controversial, or too politically incorrect.

"After I'd won the BBC award, someone from the Cambridge Folk Festival rang to book me so long as I didn't sing the song which had so much upset people when I was there eight years previously.

"He hadn't a clue what the song was and neither had I. My songs have always been socio-political. I turned it down.

"There are quite a few festivals the same. It's a niggle and I don't understand it. Folk music is supposed to be the last bastion of free speech."

His diary again overflowing, he's set a target of next March for a return to full vigour. The folk tale has a happy ending.

...and finally, last Saturday's At Your Service column noted signs on a back road in Barney indicating that it was part of the W2W. If not wall to wall, what on earth could it mean?

Val Wilson in the Teesdale tourist information office has kindly pointed out - and who'd have guessed? - that it's the Walney to Wearside, a 150-mile coast to coast cycle route inaugurated on July 1 this year from Walney Island, near Barrow, to Sunderland.

The fittest, it's reckoned, will take two days. The Tan Hill Inn, now under new ownership, is approximately and very conveniently in the middle.