FURTHER proof of all that’s said about old uns and best uns, County Durham Age UK’s men’s breakfast last Wednesday was entertained by our old friends Paul Hodgson and Terry Schofield, boxing’s answer to the Chuckle Brothers.

The branch meets in the café above Durham Market Hall, a building erected in 1851 on a site formerly occupied by the palace of the powerful Neville and Raby families. The old place may have heard nothing like it.

Now 70 and a ringer for that guy in the Specsavers ad, Terry was himself a boxer – 230 fights as an amateur, 33 as a pro – but still needed an early doors stiffener in Wetherspoons before taking on an audience of 15 or so.

He’d hardly slept, he said. Nor had the chap up from Newton Aycliffe but that, he supposed, was the dawn chorus. “Newton Aycliffe is Blackbird City,” he reckoned.

Hodgy, more familiar to readers of these columns, never threw a punch but was a chin-first secretary of Spennymoor Boxing Academy and has been bobbing and weaving ever since.

Terry, he said, was nicknamed The Candle – “one blow and he’s out” – and had also lost his final five fights because of injured hands. “The referee kept standing on them.”

Terry, still coaching at Shildon Boxing Club, talked of fights against men like the Birkenhead Assassin, hitherto thought to have been Dixie Dean. As may have been said in different circumstances, he went down very well.

Hodgy was appreciated, too. “Terry’s brilliant. The older he gets the better he was,” he said.

The breakfasts – “in association with the Daily Mail,” it says on the card – are held every third Wednesday and are open to men Over 50.

The meal’s enjoyable, too. Long experience suggests that, for £3.50, it’s a very good value morning.

THE chap may have had something about Blackbird City. In a Q&A with local industrialist John Finley – who among other things owns an “activity centre” in a former World War II munitions factory in the town – Aycliffe Today Business magazine asks his favourite Tweeter. “Are you talking about blackbirds?” John replies. “I don’t do Twitter, I’m afraid.”

THE University of the Third Age probably aims at much the same demographic as the Men’s Breakfast, but is unisex and makes do with a biscuit. The South Durham branch meets at Bowen Hall in Darlington, a venue previously unheard of.

It’s half-hidden in Faverdale, down a ship-in-a-bottle drive. That I’m the speaker, and that a plaque records the hall’s opening in December 1967 by Lady Starmer, incorrigibly prompts the story of the unscheduled mid-road meeting between the wonderful Lady Starmer and the equally unforgettable Jungle, eminence grease among the town’s Hell’s Angels.

Column regulars know it, the audience appeared not to. At the University of the Third Age, you learn something every day.

Doubtless it was for reasons of age and decrepitude that last week’s column misread the name of the school magazine at the former Spennymoor Grammar Technical School.

It wasn’t Silver Bugle but Silver Buckle – “as in Bobby Shafto, who lived down the road,” former teacher John Biggs patiently corrects.

The Silver Bugle, as we noted, was once a pub in Bishop Auckland main street, named – points out Billy Neilson – in honour of the DLI. Previously the Black Boy, it ended life as the Tut and Shive.

The Silver Bugle was one of Bentley’s Yorkshire Brewery’s sporadic ventures north of the Tees – didn’t they also have the Bay Horse at Middridge? Based in Woodlesford, near Huddersfield, the brewery was almost 200 years old when effectively taken over by Whitbread’s in 1968.

The Silver Bugle is now a betting shop. Sic transit gloria, mundi, as probably they used to say at Spennymoor Grammar Tech.

...And finally back to old uns and best uns. The younger bairn emails to point out that Matthew Parris in The Times has pinched my favourite joke, but doesn’t tell it as well. He means the hoary and over-contrived tale of the monumental mason in Yorkshire – Yorkshire’s the important bit of the story –who misses the final ‘e’ from the inscription “She were thine.”

On the first point the bairn’s mistaken. My favourite joke remains the one about ice hockey being a card game, but readers know that one, too.

Arch enemy topples

THE Northern Echo has employed the wonderful word “egregious” precisely 142 times in the last 25 years. On almost every occasion it was hired, unrewarded, by me.

From the Latin egregius, literally meaning out of the flock, it’s now translated as outrageous, notorious, conspicuously bad or offensive.

Older readers may recall that William George Bunter was considered an egregious ass by fellow Greyfriars pupil Hurree Ramset Jam Singh, known as Inky because those were different days. The egregiousness, he probably added, was terrific.

The column has applied it to everything from Watney’s Red Barrel to the once-proposed tartification of the Half Moon pub in Durham – “one of the more egregious obscenities in the hideous history of pub evisceration” – and from Tracy Emin to Lindi St Clair.

Frequently, too, there has been talk of egregious apostrophes, most memorably in the case of the otherwise acclaimed Raby Hunt restaurant in Summerhouse, west of Darlington, where a sign indicated ”Loo’s.”

“Every which way but loo’s,” the Eating Owt column incorrigibly observed.

Most abundantly, however, the adjective has been used in “egregious arches”, describing the monstrosities which appeared at either end of Shildon town centre, officially to mark the millennium but effectively to mock it.

Even had they been attractive, or remotely aesthetically appealing, it would have been akin to putting a caviar label on a jar of fish paste, so benighted the main shopping street. One column, back in 2006, supposed even so that the town had been drastically disfigured.

Then in the paper last week, buried up to its neck in other stuff, was the news that the arches are to be removed to facilitate other improvements ahead of the Flying Scotsman’s forthcoming sojourn at the National Railway Museum.

Going for good? “Definitely, they’re being scrapped,” says a Durham County Council spokesman.

Sarah Robson, the council’s head of economic development and housing, says that – 16 years after they were erected, and at goodness knows what expense – the cost of keeping the arches would be “extremely high because of their current condition.”

The council consulted townsfolk. “The response was generally supportive of our planned improvements rather than keeping the arches,” says Sarah. “This not only saves taxpayers the expense of repairing something they told us they didn’t want to keep, but also future ongoing maintenance costs.”

The egregious arches will disappear very shortly. The rejoicing will be terrific.