Obit of the action

BRIAN Redhead's funeral was held on Monday afternoon at St Gregory's in Bedale, the town where he'd spent all his 61 years. Brian was a journalist, mostly for the Darlington and Stockton Times, but latterly for the Echo, too.

For the last quarter-century or so he'd chiefly covered the Bedale area - conscientiously, and with a real care for the community.

Though we were contemporaries, we were pretty different, not least in writing style. It was thus something of a surprise, ten minutes before the service, to be approached by the Reverend Cath Vickers and asked if a 2006 column on a Palm Sunday service in Bedale were mine or his.

Cath had been told it was Brian's, thought it so compelling that she'd based part of her funeral address on it.

The first few words would to regular readers at once have given it away. The third paragraph was addressing the problem of holding a Palm Sunday tableau in a garden centre full of bairns abetted by a donkey called Dusty.

"It was wonderfully effective for all that. The road to Jerusalem was never meant to be straight and narrow, the Last Supper to win a Michelin star nor Calvary to be attended by the Co-operative Funeral Service and by a twominute silence."

It was also the occasion on which the bairns, told that Jesus would have wanted to make an impression on entering Jerusalem, were asked what he'd have ridden on.

A five-year-old hand shot up at once.

"A Ferrari," said its owner.

Brian, bless him, was more conservative and certainly no worse for that. He was also ceaselessly meticulous in his lifelong quest for factual accuracy.

His celestial reaction to a eulogy based on a case of mistaken identity cannot easily be imagined. (Okay, it can.) The splendid Mrs Vickers had hastily revised her address (in the loo, it's said).

Afterwards, she shared what she'd meant to say about that column and its imagined author, one of the few cases in history in which the subject of an obituary laughs out loud as it's delivered by the priest. It was really rather gratifying.

THE other reason that today's column has been running a bit late is that on Monday morning, the specs broke yet again. Only on Friday I'd been to see Geoff Foster, the world's best optician, assured that while things were very far from 20-20 they hadn't actually deteriorated. It was on the way out of the consulting room that I walked side-on into the display, frames flying all over the floor. "Ah," said Geoff cheerfully, "peripheral vision gone as well."

UPON return from Brian's funeral tea, a letter awaited from General Irwin Rommell, Tent 113, Little Moscow.

All that may tentatively be ascertained is that Little Moscow is, on this occasion, not a million miles from Ferryhill Station and that Rommell may have been a Sunderland fan.

He and Mrs Desert Fox, at any rate, have been musing about old words and old ways, especially in the North-East.

The list's too long fully to include, but a fine old memory-jogger, nonetheless.

The past tense includes nit nurses and knocky-nine-doors, blackclocks, bleazers and basin cuts, Doggarts' clubs, sticks of Spanish, hadding your hosses and Jimmy Clitheroe on the wireless every Sunday dinner time.

Desert Fox also recalls putting pennies on the line at The Crag - that was Ferryhill Station - the peanut man on the boys' end at Roker Park, riding the waste buckets on the pit heap at Mainsforth, people asking for your apple gowk.

"When we were at school in those drug-free days, an E was something my report was full of and crack was what I got around the lug for effort, or lack of it."

Segs appeal was simply making your boots spark in the playground. Readers may have memories of their own.

ANOTHER blast from the past - the phrase may be a little unfortunate - David Walsh in Redcar drops a note for the next time we get around to discussing outside netties - "about once a quarter, I think".

Four of them, anyway, were having a "Yorkshiremen's" debate when, inevitably, the subject came up.

Why, asks David - clearly anxious to ventilate the issue - did so many of the doors have a strange crescent shape carved into them? Someone may be able to get to the bottom of it.

TIMES change, of course. It's reported that Old Shildon Workmen's Club, among the last bastions of the men-only bar, is finally to allow in women. It may even increase trade a bit. Last time the column was there, 7.30 on a Saturday evening, the total male attendance was three.

LAST week's mention of HORSA huts in schools - it stood for Huts Ordered (for the) Raising of the School Age - reminded retired teacher Chris Eddowes in Hartlepool of her days wrestling with ROSLA, another educational acronym.

That one was Raising of the School Leaving Age and Chris and a colleague spent Friday afternoons dealing with adolescents who'd rather have been almost anywhere else.

They brought in a "delightful" old lady from the St John Ambulance, who taught them first aid and ruled them with a rod of iron. "One whiff of sal volatile and they'd do anything for her,"

recalls Chris.

"They bandaged each other until the room looked like the Egyptian mummy section of the British Museum. I didn't rise to their bait of being a volunteer."

Everyone passed their junior certificate.

Sometimes, says Chris, she thinks it was the most useful thing they ever did in school - "but those were the days before we had a national curriculum. You were master, or mistress, of your own classes' education".

WHISPER it, but Mrs Eddowes also points out that last week's Gadfly misspelled "poe", meaning chamber pot.

It's actually po, plural pos, and may derive from a euphemistic French pronunciation.

The column infamous for using long words can't even spell one with just two letters.

LAST week's column also mentioned "obituary poems" in classified ads, prompting a call from Tom Dobbin in Durham who'd waited years for the chance to quote a little cutting he'd kept. He suspects it was Alan Bennett, called Lane of Memories Down the lane of memories Our thoughts will never dim, As the stars begin to shine We'll remember her.

It was also Bennett - and here the column returns to its old scatological self - who mused upon advancing years: Here I sit, alone and sixty, Bald, and fat and full of sin, Cold the seat and loud the cistern As I read the Harpic tin.

THE piece on the Eagle, if not the monstrous Mekon, brought a note from Les Wilson in Guisborough.

He'd not only bought the first edition, in 1950 - "I read it outdoors, in the sunshine"

- but recalls a feature in which a cricket wicket was portrayed with four stumps.

Similarly Eagle-eyed, a reader wrote to complain. "The reply was that in an attempt to get away from cricket's image of being rather dour a futuristic fourth stump was added."

Nearly 60 years on, Les remains unconvinced.

"I wonder," he says, "what Tim Wellock would have made of that."