PERHAPS because he is an unsmiling Mr June, Brian Hunter from Sedgefield has kindly dropped in a "limited edition" 2002 calendar, produced by Durham County Council.

Its depicted dozen are library users of all ages across the county, each invited to select a favourite passage from literature.

Brian, an indomitable fell walker and champion of diabetic athletics, picks something bracing from Alfred Wainwright's "A Pennine Journey"; Mr and Mrs Hammond from Spennymoor have chosen death-us-do-part lines from All My Loving by The Beatles, Enid Dawson from Chester-le-Street treasures Little Women and Elliot Edworthy's nomination of "Anything I can suck" is justified by his beaming photograph, aged about six months.

The calendar's Mr March, described simply as "Niall Quinn of Bishop Middleham", is the Sunderland and Ireland footballer featured hereabouts last week and in many other places (though the story was an old one) thereafter.

Big Niall, as noble a chap as may still kick leather, offers a curiously lugubrious extract from Spike Milligan's Small Dreams of a Scorpion:

When my passing was told

My father smiled,

No grief filled by empty space.

My death was celebrated

With two tickets to see Danny la Rue

Who was pretending to be a woman

Like my mother was.

Mrs Lillian Coates in Stanley nominates an altogether merrier passage that would be close to Gadfly's all-time favourite, too, the last stave of A Christmas Carol which begins:

"What's today, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.

"Today!" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."

The column's number one - it will certainly be read at the funeral - is probably the bit from the sixth chapter of St Matthew's gospel about considering the lilies of the field, how they grow.

Readers are invited to suggest, chapter and verse, their own favourite passage from English literature. Like young Master Elliot, we shall suck it and see.

Larn Yersel' Geordie by the late Scott Dobson may offer fewer carefully cut gems - unless you include the classic translation of "Weez buggered the bandit" - but was a North-East best-seller, nonetheless.

Last week's column lamented having mislaid a copy; Ethel Dobson - one of the Bishop Auckland Dobsons, Scotty was a Whickham lad - charitably sends her spare. "Copyright 1986," it says, though the original masterwork was surely long before that.

All this had begun with a consideration of the term "tappy-lappy" and our insistence that it was a terminological tank trap to "lorch tappy-lappy up the stairs."

Dobson has Ned Hawk's men "gannin' tappy-lappy doon the lonnen" at the Battle of Waterloo and, on the next page, Moses leading the Israelites tappy-lappy over the Red Sea.

His glossary also includes reference to shuggy boats, also in last week's column, though David Armstrong - Kelloe lad, now in Redcar - suspects that the term may be unknown outside the Durham coalfield.

On Redcar sands they were always swing boats, he recalls. Perhaps they're still shuggy boats at Beamish.

Chris Greenwell in Newton Aycliffe, who started this bonny ball rolling, finds an Oxford Dictionary reference to "lee-urch" - as in drift to leeward - whilst Tom Purvis in Sunderland consults his trusty English Dialect Dictionary (1905).

Tappy-lappy? "As fast as possible, top speed, helter-skelter," it says.

It follows, therefore, that lurching tappy-lappy is impossible, though Tom's sting may be as entomological as it is etymological. "As usual," he concludes, "Gadfly hovers above the herd."

IAN Andrew, another of the blessed regulars, recalls trying to larn hissel' Geordie long before moving to Lanchester, in Co Durham.

"I've always understood tappy-lappy to mean moving with speed or single-mindedness," he writes. "Thus in his childhood our son, now a respected member of the medical profession, used to run tappy-lappy up the stairs when his mother was trying to howk him."

It is reminiscent of the Newcastle Crown Court case a few years back involving an early hours break-in at a pub in North Shields.

The place had seemed in darkness. The miscreants broke in through the front door, crept into the back and were somewhat disconcerted - burglar alarmed, as it were - to find about 40 regulars engaged in what have become known as stoppy-backs.

"They gave us a hell of a howking," a defendant told the court, a quote faithfully reproduced in one of the Newcastle papers.

"We took a good hiding," said the next day's Northern Echo. Scott Dobson himself could not have essayed a better translation.

JOHN Ingham, another Lanchester lad by adoption, has been e-mailing the BBC - thus far without acknowledgment - about their persistent talk of a "3-1 loss". The last message was terse: "Don't you know what a defeat is? It sure as hell isn't a loss."

THE 8.14am GNER service from Darlington to London left 20 minutes late last Wednesday. "The train has been standing outside the station awaiting confusion from Arriva Trains," announced the public address.

From whatever source, and from the moment they ran out of water for the coffee, they didn't have to wait long for some more.

The train conked out - another rare visitor to the North-East patois these days - somewhere between Grantham and Peterborough. By the time that another locomotive had been sent to haul it into Peterborough and that everyone had disembarked and waited for the next one, we were two and a quarter hours late into Kings Cross.

These days, of course, there are mechanisms - like filling in a complaints form - by which seriously delayed passengers can seek compensation. Just one further problem: they'd run out of complaints forms, an' all.

LAST Wednesday's Daily Telegraph not only carried a half page advertisement extolling the relaxing splendours of GNER - "An inspired train of thought" - but a piece on renewed fears of football violence.

At Newcastle United, it was reported, nine people had been arrested at the match with Leeds and another 13 ejected for misdemeanours like persistently standing and being "a bit lairy".

Since it is not a term commonly associated with Northumbria Police - "Why, your worships, he was being as lairy as owt" - we again embraced the Oxford English.

Lairy is Cockney rhyming slang, it says, though the rhyme remains frustratingly unexplained. Its meanings include "knowing, fly or conceited" or sometimes vulgarly or flashily dressed.

A Newcastle policeman would never accuse anyone of being lairy - certainly not to the Telegraph - even if he meant drunk. He'd be sackless, like the rest of us.

... and finally, Maurice Heslop from Billingham rings about 4 down in Monday's Echo crossword - not "Monument of astute design" among the cryptic clues - which, of course, would have been "statue" - but "England" (6) for the quick fixers. The answer was Albion.

Well, possibly - as Maurice concedes - though "Albion" is more generally Great Britain, a reference to our white cliffs, and more particularly to Scotland.

So why West Bromwich Albion or Brighton and Hove Albion, asks Maurice and - come to that - why Albion Rovers?

Someone may know the answer. With the final thought that "Weez buggered the bandit" translates as "It appears that someone has broken the fruit machine", the column returns in a week.

Published: Wednesday, January 23, 2002