THOUGH possessed only of a face for radio, the column is now customarily invited to Tyne Tees Television reunions. They’re lovely occasions.

Last week’s was at the Golden Lion in Northallerton, attended by familiar old faces like Luke Casey, Andy Kluz and Paul Frost and by the ever-delightful Pam Royle (who, wisely, had taken the day off.)

There, too, was former TTT head of news and proud Hartlepool lad Dave Picken, determined still further to put the resurgent old place on the map.

Dave’s convinced that the global spread of what’s now termed populism – Trump, Brexit, all that – began with the election of H’Angus the Monkey (aka Stuart Drummond) as Hartlepool’s mayor in 2002 (and twice thereafter.) H’angus had promised free bananas for the kids.

Officially it’s termed the Hartlepool Syndrome: "The ordinary man getting fed up of being talked down to. It all began here,” says Dave.

Unofficially they call it the Monkey Manifesto.

AMONG those also gaining a toehold at the Tyne Tees do was celebrated mountaineer Alan Hinkes OBE, former Yorkshireman of the Year and an honorary citizen of Northallerton.

Not even the last of those honours earns him free ale, though Alan’s delighted to have a page about his love of a proper pint in Camra’s 2017 Good Beer Guide.

Now 62, five times atop Everest and the only Brit to have climbed all 14 mountains over 8,000m, he’s been a real ale man since Strongarm days in his North Yorkshire youth.

The Good Beer Guide also tells how his close friend Sir Chris Bonington had been invited to open a new pub and brewery at Hesket Newmarket in Cumbria, the only problem that he and Hinkes were half way up a mountain at the time.

Email and the internet not widely being available in those days, and certainly not in the Himalayas, he opened it by Telex instead.

THE Durham Age UK men’s breakfast had a record attendance last Wednesday for the visit of the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Paul Butler. It was so big an occasion, we even had black pudding.

Though still 4,979 short of biblical proportions, there were those among the regulars concerned that they mightn’t get fed at all.

“I think he’s going to have to send out for some loaves and fishes,” said the column’s miraculous old friend Hodgy, never knowingly not quoted.

The breakfasts – third Wednesday, 9.30am – are held in the upstairs café at Durham’s indoor market. It all went very well until someone realised that the PA speaker was back to front. Instead of addressing the gerontocracy, the bishop was broadcasting to the butcher’s.

Durham’s bishops no longer live in Auckland castle, translated instead to a nice new house in Etherley Lane. “We love it, wonderful views to Stanhope Top,” said Bishop Paul, perhaps mindful of the recent bishop’s wife who took umbrage at sharing the castle grounds with a beer and music festival.

Since he’d been a vicar in Walthamstow, someone asked him about Rev, the acclaimed BBC series about a parish priest in east London.

“Brilliant, wonderful insights,” said Bishop Paul, one of whose daughters is herself studying for ordination at Durham. His only problem was with the archdeacon, simultaneously obsequious and obnoxious. “I’ve never known an archdeacon like that in my life.”

NEWS in last Wednesday’s paper that the Spiritualist church in Shildon is to be revived – is that the word? – recalled the only Spiritualist funeral I ever attended. The music machine played Welcome to My World.

The service, also in Shildon in October 1998, was for Lol Brown. A truly lovely man, he’d been an outstanding footballer with Arsenal, Spurs and Norwich City but insisted that the world’s greatest team was Bishop Auckland.

While still in the old first division, he’d sneak home for illicit games with Shildon United or Howden-le-Wear Workmen’s. After retirement, a footballer’s lot being a bit different back then, he ran the Redworth Arms in Shildon and then moved to Newton Aycliffe, where at 4am each day he rose to drive a milk lorry.

His ashes were spread on the Bishops’ old Kingsway ground. His spirit will live on whenever they recall the truly great players of the past.

DOWNHOLME’S a hamlet a few miles west of Richmond, the up-and-over walk back to Hudswell a six-mile round trip with – like all the best walks – a pub in the middle.

The moors road’s almost deserted, though the Little White Bus makes one of the digressions now familiar in those parts and an occasional Army vehicle might also manoeuvre past.

There are ranges both north and south, the distant rattle of a Thomson gun, or its modern equivalent, punctuating the January stillness.

Along this road a few years back, a soldier stopped to ask us directions to Bellerby Ranges, about four miles away. Three things were slightly disconcerting – firstly that he had an Ordnance Survey map open on the passenger seat, secondly that he was headed in totally the opposite direction and thirdly that his epaulettes indicted the rank of major.

Last week’s route march was simply to check the progress of the community-owned George and Dragon at Hudswell, though the Bolton Arms in Downholme is also very agreeable and the walk could have been done in the opposite direction.

The George and Dragon is the Campaign for Real Ale’s Yorkshire pub of the year and in the last four nationally. They find out if they’ve won in mid-February, it’s said.

Ale, food and hospitality are of the highest order. A blazing fire warms things yet further. It’ll take a very good pub to beat it to the title.

RECALLING the pioneering exploits of gyrocopter aviator Ernie Brooks from Spennymoor, the column two weeks ago used a splendid photograph of a bewigged Ernie flying over a pier. Brighton pier, we said, and puzzled John Heslop in Durham.

“The coast is virtually a straight line at Brighton, so I couldn’t work out the harbour and buildings in the background.”

Pier pressure, a Google search of UK piers identified this one as Weston-super-Mare – “confirmed by a Francis Frith photograph of said harbour.”

...AND finally, the same column told of the Pointless contestant from York University who’d supposed a country with consonants as its last two letters to be Paris.

Nigel Brierley was watching The Chase, on which they were asked to name England’s most south-westerly country.

“East Anglia,” said the young lady.

“The mind boggles,” says Nigel.