ME and our kidder, who may both plead advancing years for such grammatical infelicity, mark another birthday this Saturday.

It’s a milestone, if not a millstone, the three-score-years-and-ten after which the Bible basically supposes that a man has had it.

As always seems to have been the case, I pass the milestone 20 minutes before he does, and not just his bunions to blame.

He’s a world traveller, a Saga lout. Two weeks ago he was in South America, Peru and places, this week in New England in the Fall. Since he’ll miss the birthday bash, we head last Thursday along the Esk Valley railway for a fraternal foray to Whitby.

With a senior railcard the fare from Darlington is £7.60, from Middlesbrough £5.50. It’s among life’s great bargains, £7.60 just 20p more than the price of two pints in the Black Horse in Whitby though, unlike the Black Horse, the train guard doesn’t sell snuff.

The weather has us trying to remember the words of Ode to Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – the journey’s joyous. It’s also a way of recharging batteries for the months ahead, a sort of last of the summer wind-up.

We talk holidays, his visit to Lima disappointing only in that he failed to see the statue of Paddington Bear, the duffel-coated ursa major said to have come from darkest Peru.

Perhaps by way of compensation, he’d witnessed two llamas having sex. “They didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves,” he adds, gravely.

Notwithstanding that the schools are back, the universities are thinking about it and there’s still a month before the next Goth weekend, Whitby’s wick wi’ folk.

September 29 and they’re still queuing down the steps and into the street at the Magpie. The town may have 20 or 30 fish and chip places, perhaps more, and none of them undernourished. If it’s true that there are plenty more fish in the sea, it mayn’t be the case much longer.

Our kidder also remarks upon the marked absence of seagulls. They’ve all taken off for Billingham, where he lives, he supposes.

A beer in the Granby, a beer in the Board, a stroll in the sunshine and decent fish and chips at Hadley’s. The Khyber Pass khazis are for sale – “suitable for A1, A3 or A5 development” says the Scarborough Council notice, without identifying a human alternative.

Best of all, the return rail trip as the sun sinks along the Esk Valley. If this be autumn, fast-flowing eventide, it could be rather wonderful after all.

NORMAN CORNISH got to 95, a prolific artist oft given to the observation that painting was an itch that had to be scratched and pretty much at it until his death in 2014. There’s a new exhibition at the Greenfield Arts Centre in Newton Aycliffe, dozens of paintings and drawings and – hanging among them – a 1970s John North column. The paintings are worth a bit more.

The column was promoting the Echo’s Christmas magazine, 15p, with a Cornish cover of Spennymoor, almost inevitably Spennymoor, in the snow.

“Stories by Nancy Ridley, Catherine Cookson, Owen and Brannigan and Nobby Stiles,” we promised, and no prizes for guessing the odd one out.

Cornish was what folk call a pitman painter, though he disliked the description. Just 14, he started on Boxing Day 1933 down Dean and Chapter in Ferryhill – known thereabouts as the Butcher’s Shop because of its awful accident record.

When he left the pits in 1966 he was already well known. When he died, they found hundreds of half-hidden paintings and sketches that only now greet public gaze.

All represent a fanfare for the common man. “Most of the so-called great events are well recorded,” he once said. “Sometimes the ordinary things that happen in our lives are not considered extraordinary enough.”

So Norman immortalised the ordinary. A painting’s called “Man in bar with large coat”, another "Horse and cart – Joe Bloggs”, which really does seem to have been the ragman’s name. They can sell for £25,000 or more.

Perhaps he is best remembered for his painting of Berrimans’ chip van, which fried by night in Spennymoor main street. “Threepence for a cone, tanner for a bag. I can still smell the vinegar,” recalled local councillor Bob Fleming, who opened the exhibition.

Mike Thornton, his son-in-law, is working with other family members in an attempt to turn the best of 269 sketch books – “five thousand drawings, more than Leonard da Vince did,” said Mike – themselves into a book.

There are plans to recreate his studio at Beamish Museum, though first it’s likely to be reincarnated at Spennymoor Town Hall. The appeal endures, the value appreciates. Bob Fleming summed it nicely: “It’s about the way we were.”

n The Greenfield Gallery is part of Greenfields Community College, Newton Aycliffe DL5 7LF. The Shapes of Cornish, admission free, is open Monday to Friday 10am-9pm until November 9.

THE same 1970s John North column noted that, within a few weeks, Spennymoor in the pages of Melody Maker magazine had variously been called Spennymore, Spennymoore and Spennyworth. All very careless, but why had the old place been so upbeat in the first place?

LAST week’s piece on former Echo writer Leslie Geddes-Brown, still going strong, recalled a 1971 column in which she supposed that the essential components of a child’s education should be shorthand and gardening.

His Pitman’s may be a bit truncated, his spelling a little iffy, but in young Charlie Hodgson’s pumpkin patch he’s really going to the ball.

Gary, his dad, has an allotment in Middlestone Moor. There’s even a lemon tree – about which Peter, Paul and Mary once sang – and a harem of happy hens which source the best scrambled eggs in history.

Charlie, just eight, loves it all – “He’s never away from the garden,” says Gary – but it’s his pumpkins, nearly as big as he is, which are the real growth industry.

“The allotment’s the best thing that ever happened to Charlie, brought him on no end. Your columnist all those years ago was spot on,” says Gary. If only they could do something about his shorthand…

THE column supposed LGB to be a 1970s version of Sharon Griffiths, save that the ever-admirable Ms Griffiths probably made a better bacon sandwich. “Did you know,” writes a Darlington reader who asks anonymity, “that the Sage in Gateshead won’t serve bacon sandwiches after 11.45am? Shame.”

Mike Morrissey, one of Leslie’s long-retired colleagues at the Echo, recalls her being despatched to conduct what the trade calls a vox pop – street interviews – barely half an hour before she was due to catch a train to London for the weekend. She flew out, talked the talk, returned, typed it all up and still made the train – and that’s the way we were, an’ all.

...AND finally back to Whitby, the English venue for Jeremy Clarkson’s new motoring series for Amazon. In the Sunday Times he heaps praise – about as English a town as any in the land, he supposes. “Much more important,” Clarkson adds, “no one has ever been to anywhere in the world and said, ‘Do you know what, this is just like Whitby’.”