USUALLY if imprecisely associated with Christmas, Messiah was performed at St Thomas' church on Stanley Hill Top last Tuesday evening.

For the Crook and Weardale Choral Society it was a black tie occasion, for the audience a top coat job. Ne’er cast a clout, up there it was cold enough for Christmas, too.

Stanley – known also as Wooley Terrace, Mount Pleasant and one or two other things – is one of Christendom’s great places. Messiah is among its greatest hits.

The little Methodist chapel is gone, the football club (and the Little House on the Prairie) has gone, the post office and shops have gone. St Andrew’s steadfastly remains, though a 90mph gale recently blew out one of the stained glass west windows.

“We’re talking to the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office,” said Dave Ayre, the 84-year-old churchwarden.

Brilliant bloke, Dave Ayre – long-time trade union official, champion of the workers and of the community, ardent cyclist. Still he covers 20 miles at speed, though no longer racing. “It wasn’t fair on the timekeeper, keeping him waiting all that time,” he said.

He lives on the edge, that is to say the ridge, where the fire’s always in – not out. I’d last sat beside it in the summer of 2008. “It’s been lit ever since,” he said, and the fire still burns in Dave Ayre, too.

EVERY year, always April 28, he organises an International Workers’ Memorial Day service at St Thomas’. I’d attended in 2005, the preacher Dr David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham.

“Today the most obvious and chief reason for not believing in God is the words and actions of those who say they do,” he said and – later – “Though in my 81st year I am fed up of religious and religion, I can’t for the life of me stop believing in God.”

The service had been led by Fr Peter Davis, an Australian who’d been Vicar of Tow Law and neighbouring parishes – in Tow Law, the column observed they probably think the outback is the netty – and who fortified himself with a special reserve of Baxter’s lobster bisque and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie.

Last heard of, he was running the buffet car on the West Coast main line. They probably don’t sell lobster bisque.

ROGER KELLY, the conductor, tells us that Messiah was written exactly 275 years ago, George Frideric Handel completing his masterwork in 28 days – much the same time that it takes the No 1 bus to get to Stanley from Darlington.

Usually of late we’ve heard it at the annual Good Friday oratorio at Hetton-le-Hole chapel, where the hobs-of-hell pews speak of Primitive Methodist asceticism.

The Crook and Weardale folk carry it off wonderfully well, admirably accompanied on the organ by Sue Amos, who’s also organist at St Paul’s church in Spennymoor.

We chat afterwards. “Ah, Mr and Mrs Amos,” someone says, neatly, though we are unrelated. Sue is as finely tuned as I am irredeemably cloth-eared.

The audience is sadly small, probably half of the 20-odd family and friends. We remember to stand for the Hallelujah Chorus, one of two pieces in the musical canon for which not so to do is deemed an act of treason.

Thereafter, beneath the Wooley pit banner – “Succour the widows and orphans,” it pleads – a spread to feed the 5,000 includes a world class corned beef pie. “Isn’t it great, no one wants to go home,” says Dave, though the temperature outside might also have something to do with it.

The really good news is that, this very evening, the Crook and Weardale Choral Society performs Messiah (7.30pm) in St Andrew’s at Westgate-in-Weardale. Everyone, absolutely everyone, should go. Messiah isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life.

STANLEY also has its own life peer. Former NW Durham MP Hilary Armstrong became Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top – you know, Stanley Hill Top – in 2010.

But what of Baron Evans of Weardale, identified on the front page of last week’s Sunday Times as a former Director General of the British Security Service and head of MI5?

Is it just because of the hugger-mugger nature of his calling that the former plain Jonathan Evans appears never to have been a household name in places around St John’s Chapel?

A little cloak and daggery provides a surprising explanation: Lord Evans is a Man of Kent. England has two Weardales.

The other’s near Caterham, centred around a former 145-room manor built by the Earl of Stanhope in 1906 and knocked down before it fell down just 33 years later.

The cheeky beggars even promote a Weardale Walk. Ours is better and bonnier, of course.

“STANLEY” and “scumfished” may never hitherto have appeared in the same sentence, or in the same column. It gets a bit fresh up on Windy Ridge.

Lovely word, “scumfished” means sweltered – perhaps almost suffocated – by the heat. In the past 25 years it’s appeared 22 times in the Northern Echo – from Bearpark pit to Newbiggin chapel – on each occasion harnessed by me.

Now it’s made it to the letters pages of The Times. Chris Kilkenny in Gateshead writes that he overheard it on a bus in the Lake District and that its origin lies with the Border reiver tactic of smoking out fortified farmhouses by burning wet straw.

“I thought the word and the practice had died out in the 17th Century,” he added. The letters column has gone scumfishing ever since.

THE Times also reports that Rishi Sunak, the personable MP for Richmond, was delighted to learn that his three-year-old daughter was telling folk at nursery that her father worked at Big Ben. He was perhaps less happy when she added that he mended clocks.

LAST week’s piece on the death of Lord Walton of Detchant, the Middlestone Moor schoolboy who became a world authority on muscular dystrophy, stirred particular memories for John Biggs.

John Walton had later attended Alderman Wraith Grammar School in Spennymoor. In 1965, John Biggs was a newly qualified teacher at its successor – Spennymoor Grammar Tech – when the distinguished old boy was chief guest at speech day.

“We were required by the head teacher, the late Donald Cockburn, to attend in full academic dress and dinner suits,” he recalls.

Prof Walton, as then he was, proved so inspiring that it was deemed the school should support the mid-Durham branch of the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

With the support of the head and of teachers John Gibson and David Crockit – Davy Crockit, really? – the school built a publicity trailer in the form of a Dalek, complete with speaker system and flashing light. The Echo, and the telly, attended its launch.

John Biggs, coincidentally, later served as a governor at the Middlestone Moor school where John Walton’s father was headmaster, still supports the Muscular Dystrophy Association and still has the 1969 copy of Silver Bugle, the school magazine in which the story appeared.

There used to be a pub called the Silver Bugle in Bishop main street. There’s probably no connection.