Due deference

AN unaccustomed place in the order of proceedings, it is necessary first to propose a vote of thanks to the Women’s Institute ladies around Kirkby Fleetham, in North Yorkshire, and in particular to Val Tait.

Val asked me nearly a year ago to address their group meeting – June 14, 2012. Several months later, the lady of this house pointed out that we always take a holiday during the second week of June and that she’d booked a cottage in Cornwall.

First come first served, we put back the holiday by seven days. In Cornwall, as in most other places, the weather in the second week of June was reportedly atrocious. The third, mostly, was lovely.

For Val, the added attraction was that her son Jon – Newton Aycliffe assistant headteacher and a torch bearer for American football in the North-East – got, the following Sunday, to carry the Olympic flame through Stockton.

For the column, the bonus was in the unrequested fee, which clinked copiously homewards. We left for the Lizard the following morning.

THE friends with whom we stayed en route had a copy of the diamond jubilee edition of The Lady, that perceived status symbol for the genteel.

It carried a double-page spread about Royal Warrant holders. Who might otherwise have known that Betty’s Victoria sponge cake (£6.95) is by appointment to Her Majesty?

Other warrant holders include Colman’s mustard (£1.65), dog collars (£22.50) and something called a vintage balcony bra – £83.75 from Rigby and Peller.

HOLIDAYS nearly always seem to coincide with one or other of the Queen’s honours lists, the small print usually perused over a cardboard Costa at some distant motorway service station.

Splendid in this one to see an MBE for Judith Bainbridge from Frosterley – teacher, local historian, good Methodist and much else who organised the Easter dawn services, on the high moor above Ireshopeburn, fondly and indelibly remembered by the At Your Service column.

Good also to see recognition for old acquaintances like Adrian Grayson, much of his working and leisure time devoted to schools sport in North Yorkshire, for John Hinchcliffe – Barnard Castle councillor and cafe owner and adept at both – and for Doug Raine.

Doug, pictured right, was for donkeys’ years the village shopkeeper at Sandsend, above Whitby, though it’s as the driving force behind the wonderful new community sports facilities at Lythe, u p the road, that he may best be remembered.

Lovely man, he insists that the honour is undeserved, that all concerned should equally have been acknowledged.

It is doubtless as Doug says, many hands make Lythe work.

MORE holiday reading, Malcolm Langley’s autobiography chiefly concerns his 40 years in mental health nursing. The title Straight From the Jacket may be considered ill-fitting; Nursing: a Grievance might have been better.

Things have changed, much for the worse, he suggests. Probably he should have seen the writing on the wall when a manager ordered him to stop wearing his Fred Flintstone tie – “unbecoming of a community psychiatric nurse” – and certainly he should when, without asking, they removed the Cheryl Cole calendar from his office.

It is no longer a caring profession, Malcolm insists. Rather it’s just another business and – worse – a business with “targets”, which or may not include Fred Flintstone ties.

Straight from school – one O-level, £7.07p a week – he’d started in 1973 as a cadet nurse at Cherry Knowle Hospital, built in 1895 as the Sunderland Lunatic Asylum, in Ryhope.

Still only 55, he retired earlier this year.

He’s a Seaham lad, his father killed down Dawdon pit when Malcolm was ten, his beloved mother herself a former Cherry Knowle patient.

Though straitjackets are never mentioned, much else disturbed him – not least the patient 30-odd years ago who seemed every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to have electro-convulsive treatment under general anaesthetic – about 200 that Malcolm counted. “Quite barbaric,” he concludes, and for little more obvious reason than that it kept the poor chap quiet for a while.

He also discovered, and tried to stop, the practice of secretly tying patients into their beds at night.

Much of the book is anecdotal, much amusing, though – like one or two of his more difficult patients – he pulls no punches.

On at least two other occasions he was attacked with a knife. Though this may be what’s meant by being at the sharp end, the later reference to “metal health issues” may be supposed a typo.

A female colleague is described as a “lying, humpty-backed toad,” a nursing manager as one of the three people upon whom he wouldn’t pour water if on fire. “You may find that strange for a member of the caring professions,” he concedes.

He’s also a football man – 700-odd referee assessments after a knee injury ended his own refereeing career – an ardent supporter of musical theatre and a bit of a paranormal enthusiast, though the book’s self-published and not ghostwritten at all.

He became a community psychiatric nurse, still lives in Seaham, and contemplates selling ice creams at Sunderland Empire in order to see the shows free. There’s nothing in the dress code about yabbadabba- do’s and don’ts. Fred Flintstone ties may be optional.

• Subtitled The Autobiography of an Ordinary Bloke, the book costs £10, plus £2 postage. Profits will go to the Grace House Children’s Hospice and St Benedict’s Hospice, both in Sunderland. Details from Malcolm Langley at refwatcher@ btopenworld.com

HOME in time to pay a first visit since half the congregation left for Rome to the magnificent St James the Great church, in Albert Hill, Darlington.

Doubters forecast that it would become a carpet warehouse: the rug is being pulled emphatically from beneath the cynics’ feet.

Anglo-Catholic, it remains firmly and affirmingly within the Church of England. Still there are smells and bells, but with a little less of the panoply and much less of the Popery.

Those remaining clearly love the place, and are manifestly much taken by Canon Granville Gibson – admirable, inimitable – the retired Archdeacon of Auckland who serves as interim priest.

About 50 were present, seven of them adults seeking confirmation.

The organ’s still terrific, the singing hearty, the welcome warm. The sermon was masterful.

We ended with a blast of Purcell and went out, smiling, into the sunshine.

Every Sunday, 10am.

WRITING two or three weeks ago about the golden jubilee of Durham Choral Society, we wondered why the great composer Sir Edward Elgar should always have referred to his friend Nicholas Kilburn as The Great Auk. The man who might know, we suggested, was the polymathic Dr Bob McManners.

It is thus happy coincidence to bump into Dr McManners in the pub. It was simply because Kilburn was from Bishop Auckland, says Bob – that and the fact that the great auk, a flightless bird, had just been declared extinct.

Yet more coincidentally, the gathering is joined by John Elliott, that eminent industrialist, philanthropist and man about Co Durham. We’re trying to remember the name of the famed Bishop Auckland baking powder manufacturer, the one with the woman walking on water on the packet. John supposes it to be Pickford’s.

“Lingford’s” corrects Dr Bob.

Pickford’s is Lingford’s once removed.