STAFF at Durham Cathedral recently received notification from B&Q - as in B&Q it - that the item they had ordered was available and ready for collection.

While wholly unsure what the item might be - reports Newslink, the Durham diocesan newspaper - they were even more puzzled by the envelope.

It was addressed to Mr and Mrs Durham Cathedral. The letter began "Dear Mr and Mrs Durham."

IN Durham Cathedral on February 11 we had the chance of a one-to-one interview with Canon Tom Wright, whose appointment as the next Bishop of Durham had been announced that morning.

He was entirely friendly, manifestly sharp, greatly looking forward to a return to his native North-East.

Surprisingly, neither Iraq nor the issue of gay priests had been raised at his earlier press conference. We took the chance to fire both at him, and Canon Wright didn't duck.

He found it "tragic", he said, that the two avowedly Christian western leaders were those who most resolutely urged war.

No less unequivocally, he said that he would neither ordain homosexual priests nor those being unfaithful to their spouses and that his careful understanding of the scriptures was that homosexual activity among Christians was unacceptable.

"In the early Church, all that the pagans knew about Christians was that they believed in the Resurrection and didn't sleep around," added Canon Wright. "We need to remind ourselves of that and not capitulate to the morals of the street."

From a scholar and Christian leader, a man about to become the Church of England's fourth most senior cleric, his views might be considered both honest and unsurprising.

Others disagreed. Among the non-conciliatory calls we received last week was one from the Rev Richard Kirker, general secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, - "we just call it the LGCM," he said. Someone, probably a clergyman, had sent him the Echo cutting and he wasn't planning on framing it.

A call followed from The Observer, among our more serious Sunday newspapers. Though they had never spoken to Canon Wright, last Sunday's edition carried a story interpreting his "morals of the street" remark as a "veiled" attack on the Prince of Wales's ambitions to marry Mrs Parker-Bowles.

The comments, it said, had also "angered" officials planning tomorrow's enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is balderdash, of course. Canon Wright was simply giving a commendably candid answer to a perhaps surprising question. He had no more intention of attacking the Prince of Wales than I had of inviting the new Bishop for a pint and a pickled egg in the Shakespeare. Almost certainly more mischief making, more attempted destabilisation, will follow.

The Observer has also promised the column an "assistance" fee for confirming that the quotes weren't made up on the 723 bus back. If it's thirty pieces of silver, we're in trouble.

THE front page of this week's Church Times, meanwhile, reports the remarkable finding that eight out of ten North-East people consider themselves Christians, more than in any other English region. It doesn't reveal how many of the remaining 20 per cent are clergymen.

LAST week's column again promised more on the absurdities of county boundary changes and again, space reasons, those border line cases must wait.

We also addressed the new European regulations which threaten the Small Isles off Scotland's western coast, though Colin McCulloch draws attention to a European Commission press release rubbishing earlier stories.

"The articles would seem to be referring to a definition of islands made in a technical study by statisticians," it says, which will be a relief to John Ingham in Lanchester.

Since the Channel Tunnel now connects us to France, he'd feared, would Britons be an island race no longer?

We may or may not also be grateful to Barry Wood from Edmondsley, north of Durham, who is reminded of the quiz question to name a British island with four, two and ten letters in its name.

Pity Me roundabout.

FOOLHARDY as ever, last week's column also sought local variations on the name for childhood dares - "funkers" in Darlington, and possibly in Middlesbrough, too.

In Fishburn, says Bert Draycott - World Spoons Playing Champion - they called them huffs and duffs.

"They consisted of crazy things like running across the bit of the pit heap which was on fire underneath and hoping it didn't cave in, climbing the pit heap and grabbing hold of the bucket on the aerial flight to see how far you could travel before letting go, climbing the guy ropes holding the flight pylons and walking across the one brick wide wall across the old sewage plant."

"Obviously," adds a Bert a little breathlessly, "there was no telly to keep us amused."

EAGLE eye upon the world, Janet Murrell in Durham returns whence it came a report of the Peace March in London. "The people who are going on this march cover the whole spectre of society...."

What we obviously need is a ghost writer, who might also knock something together in the advertising department: "Chairs mahogany, Chip and Dale style, £50 o.n.o."

...and finally back to the Church Times, which recalls a 1930s sermon by Canon Claude Jenkins on the subject of St Frideswide.

Canon Jenkins ascended the pulpit, gazed around and began. "Of St Frideswide, absolutely nothing is known; she was doubtless good," he proclaimed, and returned whence he came.

Unfortunately this is four words shorter than the celebrated sermon delivered by the Rev Paul Walker, newly installed as curate of St Mary's in Barnard Castle: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned ye to flee from the wrath to come."

The splendid Mr Walker is now Vicar of Norton, Stockton. Unlike Canon Jenkins, he was subsequently named the Church Times preacher of the year.

Ex cathedra, as probably they say in higher places, the column returns next week.

Published: 26/02/2003