By George, what a pirate

"There's smuggling in my antecedents, too, you can check. I was done for it in Sunderland, rowing out to the Polish fishing boats and smuggling 25 jewel gold watches.

"It's carried on right down the line. We're still pirates in our family."

George, Shildon lad by adoption, is a dear old friend: the only flaw to his eagerly recounted story, however, seems to be that Barnacle Bill never existed.

George claims to have discovered proof of the skull and crossbones connection when a long lost relative from New Zealand called at his Shildon headquarters last week.

"I've always had the feeling that I was related to Barnacle Bill and someone came from the other side of the world to prove it."

Barnacle Bill the Sailor, so far as we can discover, was a girl-in-every-port scallywag - pock marked, tattooed, lecherous and fearsome and therefore nothing like George whatsoever.

Apart from anything else, he only existed in a 1930 Betty Boop cartoon. The song is still well known, though often (apparently) to less printable words.

Who's that knocking at my door?

Who's that knocking at my door?

Who's that knocking at my door?

Cried the fair young maiden.

It's only me from over the sea,

I'm Barnacle Bill the Sailor;

I'm all lit up like a Christmas tree,

I'm Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

I'll sail the sea until I croak,

I'll fight and swear and drink and smoke,

But I can't swim a bloomin' stroke

I'm Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

Barnacle Bill is also the name of a rock on Mars and of several fish and chip shops. George remains grateful to the chap who's proved he's his great, great uncle.

"Next season on our new ground," he says, "he'll be playing centre forward."

VERA Baird QC, the one-time Ludworth orchids campaigner about whom we wrote a few weeks back, had made it to the three man, three woman shortlist to succeed Mo Mowlam on Labour's return ticket to Redcar.

Not so fortunate, murmurs our man on Coatham Rocks, the nomination seeker who, seeking to impress local worthies, drove out to inspect the flood damage at Skinningrove.

Thanks, they said, but the local MP had been the day before. He is Ashok Kumar - the hopeless hopeful was in the wrong constituency.

WARFARIN, with which this column has become daily familiar, is a drug for thinning the blood. It's also used as rat poison, the jokes as whiskery as the rodent.

Ken Rowland, another Shildon lad but now in Peterlee, is also winning the battle by using the warfarin and wants to help others with similar problems.

Ken, an ex-polliss who's raised almost £400,000 for charities by selling specially designed tie-pins, has just spent five weeks in Hartlepool General. Apart from the time when they told him on Friday that he might have cancer of the liver, waited until Monday to do a CAT scan and then revealed that he hadn't, he was impressed.

What Ward 7 needs, however, is a "Coagucheck" machine, which analyses blood. At present they borrow one from elsewhere in the hospital.

So his shiniest new pin depicts a blood thinning rat, intended to identify the wearer as a warfarin user and available in the four colours in which the different strength pills also come.

"I'm hoping it becomes nationally accepted that the wearer is a warfarin user" says Ken - though others, of course, are welcome to throw a few bob into the pot.

The pins are just £1 from Ward 7 at Hartlepool, or from Ken c/o Peterlee Police Club, Yohden Way, Peterlee SR8 1BQ. And doesn't that jaunty old sea-rat remind you of Barnacle Bill the Sailor?.

OSCAR Wilde, who observed that he could resist everything except temptation, died 100 years ago today.

It's a different quotation from Lady Windermere's Fan, however, to which Allan Newman in Darlington draws the column's attention:

CECIL GRAHAM: What is a cynic?

LORD DARLINGTON: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In the 19th Century, Allan reckons, the Earl of Darlington was the eldest son of the Duke of Cleveland. The titles (to answer his question) have long been subsumed by the Barnards; Debrett's Peerage offers one or two Darlings but not a Darlington in sight.

Who's Who embraces a Darlington who's organist at Christ Church, Oxford and another who's more familiarly known as Joyce Blow. There's also - and this is the interesting bit - an entry for Alexis Jane Cleveland, 46, who's one of the Very High Ups at the Benefits Agency and lists her only "club" as Durham WMC.

So what, pray, is the Benefits Agency's operational support director of the Benefits Agency doing drinking in Durham Workmen's Club?

FILM buff Tony Hillman points out that globe trotting fellow Darlingtonian Charles Simon - 92 and still on 40 Dunhill king size a day - has recently appeared in a new BBC house ad. Sadly, however, not even the venerable Mr Simon - best remembered from Mrs Dale's Diary - has made a commercial impact on Tony. He's forgotten what it's for.

WITHOUT dwelling on it too long, the column two weeks ago was chiefly about the lavatory - even a picture of a four holer at Ravensworth, above Richmond, which has stirred Ron Hails in Hartlepool from his autumnal cogitations.

Ron was with the 2nd Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles in Palestine, 1947. There - "fit to rank with the Ancient Wonders of the World" - the other ranks used a 16-holer, a palace (he says) to behold.

"Made of stone, it looked like a very large bell tent, the inner sanctum perhaps 16 feet across so that all were within chatting distance.

"On a busy day it resembled one of the market places in ancient Jerusalem, a constant jabbering in the many dialects that pass for the English language."

It was a palace, of course, compared with the "trenches for the use of" inflicted upon (as Ron Hails suggests) those who fought with the Last Lot. But that's another business entirely.

THE toiletries, it may be recalled, were on the back of Down the Yorkshire Pan, a restrained and therefore delightful new book by Dulcie Lewis, who lives in Wensleydale.

The clock at Holy Trinity church in Darlington got in there somewhere, too.

If the clock had been started at noon on January 1 1850, and the pendulum clicked once every two seconds, how many times would it have clicked by Christmas Eve this year, we asked?

Five copies of Dulcie's book were on offer to those with the nearest answer. Unlike Holy Trinity's celebrated timepiece, the competition really chimed; unlike it also, it failed to run like clockwork.

Dozens of different answers have ensued. John Egglestone in Darlington became so frustrated, he tried to calculate the time as a percentage of his age - "and then realised I was getting as bad as you."

Finally, a consensus arose. The answer 2,382,242,400 is agreed by Holy Trinity curate Barnaby Huish, by retired maths teacher Marian Boxall whom he consulted, by the Artful Accountant, the bairn and by Bill Donovan and PR Cockrill, both in Darlington.

Several others shared a next best guess of 2.382,285,600 - possibly, though the brain is much too over-accommodated to take it in, because they forgot that 1900 wasn't a Leap Year.

Books very shortly to Messrs Donovan and Cockrill and, first out of the nearly hat, to Tom Purvis (and his "recounts of Floridian proportions") in Sunderland, Dorothy Young in Dunnington, York, and Norman Harris in Whorlton, near Barnard Castle.

The column clocks on again next Thursday; time flies.