"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time… as a good time: a kind, forgiving, pleasant, charitable time. The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women by one consent seem to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys..."
– Scrooge’s nephew, A Christmas Carol

NEVER a cross word? Scrooge’s amiable nephew could never have had in mind the Gadfly column, nor the cruciverbalists who read the magazine 1 Across.

The mag, for crossword enthusiasts, is edited by Christine Jones, who lives in the old Methodist chapel at Middleton Tyas, near Scotch Corner, and also finds time to be parish council clerk. We wrote of her in 2005.

Their hero, if not their demigod, is the Rev John Galbraith Graham, chaplain of St Chad’s College in Durham from 1949-52 but for much of his career in the diocese of Ely.

Graham prodigiously compiles under the pseudonym Araucaria, the botanical name for a monkey puzzle tree. It’s he who devised the “notorious”

anagram “Chaste Lord Archer vegetating” to which the answer was “The Old Vicarage Grantchester”, Jeffrey Archer’s home.

The actress Prunella Scales, in the foreword to his first compilation, wrote that she loved going to bed with him. They got Timothy West, her husband, to write the second.

Araucaria, fiendish as ever, fast approaches his 90th birthday. Christine Jones is among those helping organise a celebration lunch at King’s College, Cambridge, his alma mater, on February 19.

By way of promoting the event to its erudite audience, the Guardian last Saturday included the wonderfully festive clue “O hark the herald angels sing the boy’s descent which lifted up the world” (5,9,7,5,6,2, 5,3,6,2,3,6).

We heartily commend it to Christmas consideration. The answer at the foot of the column.

IT was a birthday present, and strictly for the lady of the house, which took us last Friday to see York Theatre Royal’s production of The Railway Children at the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station, London. Great idea, kids.

You may have heard of it. It’s an ingenious adaptation of Edith Nesbitt’s book that co-stars the elderly Stirling Single locomotive from the National Railway Museum and no matter that the steam is by way of dry ice.

It’s wonderful. Those who remember the film, or who can still see Jenny Agutter waving her red flannel petticoat in perilous proximity to The Flyer, will want to know they’re even selling “Daddy, my daddy” Tshirts.

Better still, the programme notes that the Stirling Single and its cast will be pulling into another, unnamed, English city in 2011. Wherever the run, catch a train and go.

UNLIKE that experienced back in September by Martyn Evans, a professor of philosophy at Durham University, the journey to and from London was wholly – commendably – uneventful.

Prof Evans, it may be recalled, was returning from Birmingham to Durham on a first-class Advance Purchase ticket. Since the evening was drawing on, and since he lives in Hurworth, near Darlington, he decided to get off at Darlington only to find that the automatic barrier wouldn’t accept his ticket.

The railway company subsequently demanded £155, the cost of a ticket from Birmingham to Darlington, even though he’d shortened his journey.

The good professor was less than philosophical. “It’s madness,” he said.

By way of early Christmas present, the lady has now bought on eBay a letter written in 1874 by George Stephenson of the North Eastern Railway at Darlington to James Atkinson, a relief clerk at Shildon.

A Mr Hollings, it transpires, had had a ticket to Bishop Auckland but broken his journey at Shildon – as, it appears, was his custom.

The relief clerk, by the look of it, had reminded him of the error of his ways. Stephenson sympathised, told Atkinson to show his letter to the station master.

“Ask him,” added Stephenson, “to explain how it happens that he has been allowing this sort of thing.”

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

STILL in the present tense, David Roberts points out – “knowing your love of all things Taylor’s” – that the noted shop in Darlington is selling personalised 4lb pork pies. “I’ve just bought one with his name on it for my dad,” he adds.

“It could be his best present ever.”

PIE in the sky, very likely, last week’s column pondered some home truths about Newcastle United. Should it be St James’ Park, as the club – and The Northern Echo – now prefer, or St James’s Park, as it was when they won things?

It chimed with Neil Hacking, assistant editor of BBC Television in the North-East and Cumbria, who a couple of years back had done a tongue-in-cheek piece on the same thing.

“My assertion that the correct use is St James’s Park was backed by Prof Vivian Cook of the department of linguistics at Newcastle University and by the Apostrophe Protection Society,” Neil recalls.

Les Wilson in Guisborough believes that the St James’ style may have been pioneered by veteran North-East sports writer Doug Weatherall, who employed it when everyone else went to St James’s.

Mind, adds Neil Hacking, Newcastle United seem to care little for such niceties, anyway. On a corner of the ground there’s a notice sheepishly pointing the way to Shearers Bar.

THE slightly wider S-factor debate is over whether a simple apostrophe, or an apostrophe s, should possessively be used when a polysyllabic name itself ends with an s.

Was 1953 the year of Stanley Matthews’ Cup final or Stanley Matthews’s Cup final?

Readers still disagree. Retired teacher Keith Hopper, in Darlington, quotes the venerated Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gower, but only to the extent that some people prefer to let the apostrophe do the job alone.

Brian Mulligan in Sedgefield recalls his formative years at Hartlepool Roman Catholic Grammar School. “Brother Anselm insisted that the second s was superfluous,”

he says. “To hear you go on like that, he’d be turning in his grave.”

CRICKET fans will be familiar with the concept of sledging, particularly in the ongoing Ashes series. As Martin Birtle again points out, the chap on The Weakest Link last week clearly hadn’t read the verbals warning. What was the 2009 book The Art of Sledging about, asked Ms Robinson. Bobsleigh, he replied.

MARY Everett, among the Gadfly Irregulars, admits to being a TOG. They’re Terry Wogan fans, apparently – Terry’s Old Geezers, or Gals. It’s perhaps more in keeping with the season, however – and, besides, there is to be never a cross word – not to articulate what she thinks of much of the rest of the BBC’s pronunciation. Then Mary stops short, too. “I’m beginning to rant like Rhod Gilbert,” she says. (At least I’d heard of Terry Wogan).

SO finally back to that Christmas clue. The answer – a breathtaking anagram – is “While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground”.

May everyone enjoy the Christmas of their dreams and, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one.