Gadfly

The Rose and Crown is almost extolled in the 2004 Good Pub Guide, between September 28 and Shrove Tuesday a horn was once sounded at 9pm to guide the misguided through the forest and Bainbridge has at least one other claim to fame - once in the Guinness Book and still toasted on the National Park notice board on the side of the village bus shelter.

The Bain, just two and a half miles of it, is "reputedly" England's shortest river.

(There is no need for the qualification "reputedly". As all dalesmen know, the National Park Authority's word is gospel throughout the land, though a similar claim is made for the River Kent, in Kendal. It may be taken with two ounces of mint cake.)

We mention all this because, before taking a short break, the column two weeks ago tried to source the difference between a "river" and a "beck" or "stream".

Several readers have unconvincingly suggested that width - never mind the quality - has something to do with it, while Brian Vickers in Bishop Auckland has Norwegian friends who suppose a beck to be a stream with stones above the water.

But why should the briefly babbling Bain be a river and, nearby, Scargill Beck play fluvial second fiddle?

Phil Westberg e-mails from South Africa with the view that streams north of Durham City are named burns "in the Scottish style" while those south of the city are becks "in the Yorkshire or Cumberland fashion". The information flow remains unsatisfactory, however. Before much more water passes beneath the Bain bridge, we shall get to the river bottom.

POTTERING around a wet and woebegone Wensleydale, incidentally, we also came across one of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority's finer efforts - a picture postcard with a poem simply entitled "Rain".

Since it is "Anon", we reproduce it with no authority whatsoever:

It rained and it rained and rained and rained

The average fall was well maintained

And when the tracks were simply bogs

It started raining cats and dogs.

After a drought of half an hour

We had a most refreshing shower,

And then the most curious thing of all

A gentle rain began to fall.

Next day was also fairly dry

Save for the deluge from the sky,

Which wet the party to the skin

And after that the rain set in.

TWO days earlier and a couple of dales to the north, lunchtime conversation in the CB in Arkengarthdale - much more of which in next week's Eating Owt column - had turned to the word "camp".

In most senses it remains a military base, of course, though few may know that it also means "cat's whiskers".

Why, however, has camp also come to mean effeminate - as in "As camp as a row of pink tents" - and why did Catterick Camp suddenly, self-consciously, become Catterick Garrison?

It was time once again to consult the Oxford English Dictionary, the cornucopia in 20 volumes for which in the year 2000 we had all but taken out a second mortgage.

After pitching for four pages, the great dictionary finally reaches the "pink tents" site. "Etymology obscure" says the OED, and for once we were lost for words.

STILL up river, Phil Westberg discovered on the same website an "old saying" that Durham is famous for seven things: wood, water and pleasant walks, Law and Gospel, mustard and old maids.

A Mrs Clements, it adds, made the first English-style mustard in Durham in 1720 and the city once had three separate mustard factories.

Old maid or otherwise, does anyone make it now?

THE last column also wondered about the phrase "bees knees", prompting Ernie Reynolds in Wheatley Hill to suggest that it was an early mishearing of "business" - as in: "It's the real business."

Joyce McDowell, meanwhile, objects to the use in the At Your Service column of the phrase "paste eggs", insisting with etymological invincibility that they are "pasch" or "pace" eggs.

So, everywhere else, they are - but when in the North-East, shouldn't we keep one jarp ahead?

THE Brit was agog on Monday lunchtime. Mrs Lynn Briggs, who is - or at any rate was - American, has not only researched her family tree, not only discovered that she is a direct descendant of the Duke of Wellington but feels close enough to call him Uncle Arthur.

Shades of Private Pike and Sergeant Wilson.

Ever diplomatic, we said nothing. Only that morning, however, there had been a letter on the same subject from George Crowe in Spennymoor.

His own lack of interest in such genealogical geometry, he says, is probably due to the maternal grandfather who turned up on the doorstep with two rolls of wallpaper on which several Crowes' nests were dubiously delineated.

His grandmother, it claimed, was Sir Walter Scott's granddaughter and Sir Walter himself had traced ancestry to the kings of Scotland. "We must be related to King David, or someone," thought George.

Internet and old space, another family member has now rather more scientifically traced their roots, however. "Far from being the famous writer," adds George, "our Walter Scott was a cobbler in Penrith."

LIKE all the best folk, a former pupil of Bishop Auckland Grammar School - old BAGS as the ladies self-deprecatingly insist - Mr Dennis Wearmouth was also among the Monday lunchtime congregation.

Last Thursday, he reports, he watched and wept as bulldozers demolished most of the remaining old buildings and took his childhood memories with them.

King James I Grammar School, as properly it was known, was founded in 1605. No matter that it now has some fancified new title, are we going to let the 400th anniversary be dust to dust as well?

...and finally, we have been asked to say a few words at the "adult learners" awards ceremony in Shildon on May 20. It was a close call, apparently.

They wanted, says Janet Mohammed, a well known Shildon personality, thought about George Reynolds but concluded that he might have other things on his mind (and mightn't have the bus fare).

A second name was mentioned but he, alas, is spending a few months at Her Majesty's pleasure.

At last the award winners insisted the honours go to Mike Amos, and we head homeward with great pleasure. They'll learn summat that night, all right.

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