GERALD McDonald and Elaine Lott were married on Sunday at Kirklington, near Bedale, the reception at the officers’ mess at RAF Leeming, nearby. We were invited; it was brilliant.

The church bells pealed, the bride and groom were positively ecstatic, there were balloons with the initials G and E intertwined – suggestions that they’d been left over from the General Electric staff Christmas party may be considered scurrilous – and the food, particularly the pork crackling, was fantastic.

If the RAF Leeming officers do so well, I may have to consider becoming a high-flyer after all.

What made it particularly special for the new Supermacs, however, was the date – 10/10/10, the perfect ten as it has been called.

“He’d suggested we have it on the thirteenth of the thirteenth,” joked the bride.

They’d left press cuttings on the tables. Around 31,000 couples worldwide had chosen that Sunday for their wedding, almost twice the number of any other day in October and ten times as many as on a “normal”

Sunday.

Gretna Green had 38 weddings on Sunday – the usual is ten – while Manchester register office opened on a Sunday for only the third time in order to meet the demand.

It’s happened throughout the decade, of course – September 9 last year, and so on – and will again next year and in 2012. Thereafter, it’s reckoned, the triple whammy won’t reappear until 3001. Best pop the question quick.

FOR Gerald and Elaine, both in their 50s, perfection then got better. Before a Caribbean honeymoon in the winter, they got away for a few days to Garsdale Head – among the most wonderful places in England – above Hawes.

Garsdale station is high on the Settle and Carlisle line: they planned a romantic train trip to Leeds, another to Carlisle.

Flatteringly, it was us who’d pointed them there, via a summer church service on the platform.

Who needs a wedding present, anyway?

SOME of the online stories about October 10 weddings – and much else on the internet of late – have included the claim that this October has five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays, something that occurs just once every 823 years.

Though a moment’s thought would reveal the notion’s absurdity, it has been glibly and globally absorbed.

In truth, it’ll happen whenever October 1 falls on a Friday which, presumably, is approximately every seven years. Smarter people than I have insisted upon its authenticity.

It says quite a lot about the vulnerability of the internet; yet more about the credulity of those who blindly believe it.

PROBABLY the most familiar phrase to illustrate credulousness is “Tell it to the marines” – the Echo used it in a headline only last Thursday, about troops returning from Afghanistan.

Chambers defines “credulity” as “disposition to believe on insufficient evidence”, the phrase about telling it to the Marines said to have roots in the early 19th Century when marines were deemed to be younger and more gullible while hardened tars were, as it were, seven-seasoned.

Tell it to the Marines was also the title of Lol Cheney’s most successful silent film, but that may be considered neither here nor there.

The maritime slur has been put to Spennymoor lad Arnold Hadwin OBE, former Marine, editor of the Northern Despatch in Darlington in the 1960s and still enjoying life, Lincs and Rington’s tea – not necessarily in that order – and living in peace with his pipe.

Added to “Tell it the Marines”, he says, should be “And they’ll get the job done, whatever it takes.”

Arnold was also my first editor, a wonderful and a perceptive man of whom it might be said that his wish was my commando. Presently on sticks, he awaits a knee replacement op. “I’m finding it difficult to dig up a bumper crop of potatoes,” he says.

WHAT to make of last week’s splendidly evocative photograph, purporting to show the disappeared railway settlement of Linger and Die, near Ferryhill – one of a rolling series of unusual place names?

Cliff Howe, in Billingham, sends the same photograph taken from “From Cuna Dun to Coundon Now”, produced by pupils of St Joseph’s RC school in Coundon. A second photograph, probably taken on the same day, shows a bridge with “Linger and Die” written clearly on the parapet.

To Cliff, however, the first shot looks remarkably like Hartley Cottages in nearby Leeholme.

Ian Sanderson-Simpson is one of a Facebook group called Leasingthorners – Leasingthorne’s an almostdisappeared mining village near Coundon – long puzzled by the location of that same photograph on the site. “I think you’ve answered it for us.”

Ralph Petitjean in Ferryhill has no doubt that the photograph is of the hamlet on the Clarence Railway near Chilton. He played there as a child.

“My mother would often walk down the main line with me, late at night in the dark. Heaven forbid these days.”

STILL there are name-checks. Paul Dobson recalls Rest and Be Thankful in Scotland, Seldom Seen and Often Seen in County Durham and Sorrowful Hill at Forcett, near Richmond. Then there’s London Apprentice in Cornwall, reckoned like many more to take its name from an inn. Tom Peacock directs us to the high road from Arkengarthdale to Teesdale, where a sign indicates the hamlet of Hope. Glory may lie elsewhere.

IMPOSSIBLE to talk of Leasingthorne without recalling the great racehorse trainer Arthur Stephenson, based in the village.

Arthur, who died in December 1992, was the first man to train 100 National Hunt winners in a season – 114 in 1969-70 – and saddled more than 3,000 in an illustrious career.

He won the 1987 Cheltenham Gold Cup with The Thinker, was second in the National with Durham Edition but was particularly fond of the observation that “Little fish are sweet”.

It proves not to have been one of his own, first recorded in East Anglia in the early 19th Century. Stivvie, beyond argument, was an original, nonetheless.

SPEAKING of Facebook, which we were, Peter Sotheran, in Redcar, is aghast at an invitation from an American email correspondent to “friend” her through that medium.

The English language, says Peter, has the perfectly good verb “befriend.”

Why on earth, the protest continues, should they try to force an innocent noun to serve as a verb?

That linking complete, he might also have wondered why Facebook users then describe as “friends” a great anonymous army the vast majority of whom they will never even meet.

Its virtues else, the internet has much for which to answer.

THEN there are the lists which ever-circulate through the ether.

Jon Glen sends one of “Imponderables”, questions why “overlook” and “oversee” have opposite meanings, much the same as “wise man” and “wise guy”.

Come to that, it continues, if lawyers and disbarred and clergymen defrocked, why aren’t electricians delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed and dry cleaners depressed?

If “I am” is the language’s shortest sentence, it adds, could “I do” be the longest. This, of course, has no relevance to Mr and Mrs McDonald. May their symmetry be eternal.