Spinning yarns of yo-yos

THOUGH the intention is (generally) more benevolent, the column's eternal maunderings around the towns and villages of the North-East - usually between buses - seem sometimes to resemble the bit in the Epistle to St Peter about the devil thy adversary, walking about seeking whom he may devour.

Closer to home, an analogy from The Lambton Worm may be more appropriate. "And when at night he roamed aboot, to pick up bits of news..."

Thus in Tow Law last Friday evening, the working week over but the whirring wind farm still on time-and-a-half.

It was possible to discern that the Dans Castle pub has closed for ever (so much for an Englishman's home), that an Indian restaurant called Memsahib's Kitchen has opened on a farm that also houses the Exotic Animals' Welfare Trust and that the yo-yo is making yet another comeback.

It insisted as much in one of the shop windows. Yo-yos were not just a mere 99p, but with "centrifugal clutch".

Strings attached? Oh, come on...

THE yo-yo was probably invented in China around 1,000 years ago, first sold commercially at the World's Fair exactly a century since and was, from time to time, in favour in the playground of Timothy Hackworth Juniors, usually when no-one had a ball. We were useless at it.

The rest of the English are no good at yo-yos either, not even with centrifugal clutch. Most world records are held by Americans, the others by a 12-year-old Japanese and a Canadian called "Fast Eddy" McDonald, who did 8,437 loops in an hour and 21,663 in three hours.

Someone counted?

Other disciplines include shoot the moon, milk the cow, regenerated trapeze, 100 metre dash looping and consecutive suicides, itself an interesting exercise in regeneration.

By the 1920s, the American press likened the yo-yo craze to a case of measles, which would have its hour and then be gone forever.

In 1950, the first electrically lit yo-yo was produced, in 1974 Richard Nixon played yo-yo at the Grand Ole Opry - perhaps the origin of the soubriquet Tricky Dicky - and in 1985, they took yo-yos on the space shuttle Discovery, thus inarguably breaking the altitude record.

The British Association of Toy Retailers named it "Craze of the Century". In Tow Law, and perhaps elsewhere, the yo-yo is again on the up.

INEVITABLY, there's also a website called Yo-yos for Dummies, which proves no more readily comprehensible than an allusion in last week's John North column to "dum-tits".

Former Durham City MP Jimmy Murray - on whom more information enthusiastically welcomed - had allegedly used his maiden wartime speech to protest at the shortage of dum-tits in Meadowfield Co-op. Few understood the reference.

A dum-tit, perfectly named, was what a demented North-East mother shoved in the mouth of a recalcitrant North-East offspring.

These days they're called pacifiers, or soothers, or some such mealy-mouthed nonsense and come with contours, and in wedge shapes and (quite likely) in strawberry milkshake flavour and in the form of the infant thumb.

Suck it and see? This has been dummies for dummies.

YO-yos is one of those words which looks like it should have an apostrophe, an aberration which must at all costs be resisted. The temptation - with thanks to Tom Musgrave in Hunwick, near Crook - may not wholly explain the business card for J G Taxi's in Willington and why they offer a service to "airport's", "night club's" and "local run's."

DISCUSSING the various meanings of the word "cushy", last week's column noted the suggestion from Ernie Reynolds in Wheatley Hill that "cush" was just about the first Arabic word taught to British soldiers in the Middle East.

Usually it was coupled with the more familiar word "shufti", the euphemistic translation akin to: "Dinah, Dinah show us a leg."

Like a lot more at the time, Bob Mack from Newton Aycliffe learned a song about it when with 43 Squadron - doubtless coincidentally known as the Fighting Cocks - in Aden in 1959. "It was absolutely filthy," he recalls. "Servicemen's kids learned it, too, but happily they didn't know what the words meant."

Bob and a former rugby playing pal are occasionally moved to a reprise in their Newton Aycliffe local. "People look at us as if we're speaking in a foreign language," he says. "Fortunately, we are."

PUBLISHED yesterday, incidentally, Collins new Scrabble Dictionary includes for the first time a whole heap of "northern" dialect words said to be from the Ant and Dec language school. They include charver, croggy, dowly, ennog, yoker, chog, kerky, oller, slart, slutch and trabs - and we only know the first two. Cushy number, anyone care to translate?

ACCUSTOMED to rather more strident requests, the good folk in the Durham Constabulary press office were slightly incredulous. "Bells?" they repeated.

"Bells as in hell's bells," we repeated, though there was no real cause for alarm.

Walking the delightful Derwent Rail Way near Esh Winning a month ago, we reported that the peace had been broken by a chap on a madcap mountain bike merely bellowing "Coming through" as he essayed a passable impression of the Waterhouses Flier.

Was it really the case, we wondered, that while bikes when sold must have a bell fitted, there is no legal need to carry one thereafter?

Yes it is, says enthusiastic cyclist Bryan Chambers from Belmont, Durham, who also uses the network of railway trackbeds properly enjoyed by both walkers and cyclists.

Yes it is, confirms the polliss. Though there is legislation governing lights and brakes and tyres, nothing says that a bike must have a bell.

Bryan understands the difficulty. "My wife has a bell but is too embarrassed to use it as she doesn't want it to be seen as a 'Get out of my way' signal - thus adding to our image problem.

"Instead we slow right down behind walkers and offer a timorous 'Excuse me' if we aren't heard. Walkers unfailingly let us through."

Riding on the pavement may not be an offence, either. It appears not to be in Darlington town centre, anyway.

...and finally, a word from our clarts correspondent, and we are again grateful to John Briggs in Darlington for news from the e-bay on-line auction website.

A chap offering to sell a bag of mud from last week's Glastonbury Festival - "freshly scraped off the boots of my son this morning" - had 35,859 site visits before the deadline.

The mud - "buy it, treasure it, love it" - had come from the first two rows of the Pyramid stage. It finally sold for £490.

Mud in your eye? Centrifugally clutching more of life's vicissitudes - you know, ups and downs - the column returns next Wednesday.