Jack Amos - great man, no relation - has died, aged 75. Though the epitaph "I told you I was ill" could never be more appropriate, he never let it stop him for a minute.

Jack had a medical history, one of these columns once observed, about which Simon Schama could have made a three-part series.

"People talk about giving my body to science, but I reckon they've had it already," he said. "I don't even go to the greyhounds any more in case I catch distemper. It's just about the only thing I've never had."

In 1984, on his 28th wedding anniversary, Jack and his wife Flo both suffered severe injuries in a road accident in which a taxi driver died.

In 1989 he developed pancreatitis, his weight falling from 15 to ten stones, followed ten years later by a heart attack and then a diabetes diagnosis.

"I thought bloody great," he recalled, "I'd been doing famously until then."

Thereafter he was found to have a hyperactive thyroid and then lung cancer, which necessitated the removal of part of his right lung. The guy never stopped twinkling, though he did stop both rolling his own or smoking anyone else's.

He was a Consett lad, began working life as a reporter on the local weekly paper - a role in which he was recalled by Middlesbrough MP Stuart Bell in Tony Loves Me Really, his improbably titled autobiography.

"He had a haircut known as a DA, standing for duck's anatomy to the refined and duck's arse to the rest of us," Bell wrote.

Jack became industrial correspondent of the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle but may best be remembered for his Jack of Clubs column in the Sunday Sun and for its attendant "Command Performances" at the region's workmen's clubs.

Royal command, Princess Margaret was persuaded to attend one of them, spending several hours on the whisky and ginger. "She swore it was medicinal," said Jack.

Until retiring at 70, he'd been for almost 20 years a vigorous and knowledgeable secretary of the Durham County branch of the CIU, winning 70 per cent of the total vote in an election among 13 candidates.

Among the last times we saw him was a meeting with another Jack Amos - Willington lad and regular Hear All Sides correspondent - with whom Jack had been mates since the long-gone occasion when he ended up fully clothed in the bath, missed as a newt.

Though long teetotal, he rarely felt more at home than in Shotley Bridge Victory Club, where a wake will be held after tomorrow's funeral at St Cuthbert's church. The cancer got him at last; he'd told them he was ill.

One of Jack's favourite stories - he had many - concerned Hymie Sadler, 1950s Consett draper and chairman of the town's football club.

Hymie - "not many people in Consett called that," Jack would observe - complained to a customer one day that the summer sunlight was fading his window display.

"What you need," said the customer, "is one of those Venetian things."

Hymie pleaded poverty, but the next day a collecting tin appeared on the counter.

"For the blind," it said.

Plenty of comeback after last week's piece on the new history of the OK bus company, officially to be launched at Bishop Auckland Town Hall a week today.

They've also found the last of the clippies, now Theresa Sowerby, who they hope will attend author David Holding's book signing from 11am-3pm.

Tony Stainthorpe in Durham recalls approaching a junction when learning to drive in a Coal Board vehicle. "OK this side," said the passenger, the resultant collision with the bus perhaps inevitable. "I suppose," he concedes, "that the passenger was right.