A QUARTER of a century ago, year or two more maybe, I'd slow trained off to Thirsk to meet a vet who'd not just written a book, but injected a bit of life into it. Nice chap, Herriot: talked expansively, signed the review copy, provided a lift back to the station. The vet, the subsequent column suggested, had a bit of animal magic about him.

So it was that It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet begat It Shouldn't Happen to a Policeman, Fireman, Sanitary Inspector, Taxidermist and a pox doctor's clerk, very likely, but never - until now - an ambulanceman.

Not exactly a blue light job, then.

The ambulance service had seemed a suitable case for treatment, nonetheless, when Alan Crosskill joined the ranks on Valentine's Day, 1965.

He'd been a butcher, done national service in the 3rd Hussars, became an ambulanceman on the same day and on the same shift as an undertaker - "a butcher and an undertaker, you can imagine the hilarity that caused".

There was no uniform - "I wore my best blue suit" - and no formal training. "You were just sent out with an experienced bloke and expected to learn on the job."

Didn't it worry him? "Frightened me to death," says Alan. "I clearly remember one woman thanking God that the ambulance had arrived and thinking 'If only you knew, missis'."

He became Cleveland's deputy chief officer, took early retirement, acknowledges that things have changed greatly for the better since the days when an ambulance crew was little more than a hospital snatch squad - pick it up as you go along, as possibly they said on February 14, 1965.

In those days, ambulance equipment comprised little more than an awful lot of triangular bandages, wooden splints, a resuscitator, a first aid box and a lapel full of safety pins.

Now every vehicle has a trained paramedic, carries enough kit to sustain a small hospital and is run by a Trust, though the one that absorbed Cleveland has a name so long that the poor patient might have expired before the operator's finished answering the telephone.

"Ah yes," says Alan, "but their range of skills is fantastic. Now the treatment starts as soon as the ambulance crew gets there, not at the hospital."

He'd been inspired to apply - motivated, anyway - by a playground emergency in which a small boy fell from a swing. "I was there with my own son and I panicked, didn't know what to do. The nearest hospital was miles away, but then I remembered that there was an ambulance depot." He was on his way.

"The guys there were unbelievable, really impressed me. That's what got me started, though I don't suppose being a butcher was the ideal qualification. Basically I got the job because I could stand up, had all my own limbs and could just about do joined-up writing. They wouldn't have me nowadays. No education and 50 years too old."

He's an affable 62, lives in Hutton Rudby, south of Middlesbrough - Doctors Lane, paramedically enough - started his ambulance service career in Lincolnshire though there was little difference, he suspects, between most of the county services at the time.

"I'd turn up at a house in my blue suit and they'd say 'Who the hell are you? We sent for an ambulance'."

Then there was the maternity case in which the nurse invited him to take a seat and his mate finally came looking. The nurse re-appeared at the same time: "Your wife's ready for you now."

The best blue suit again.

Mercifully, perhaps, it was several months before he was blooded - "bloodied," they call it. Tom the erstwhile undertaker seemed to get all the nasty jobs. It was in June 1965, a boy killed by a three ton lorry and only the following night when he read that it was the same little lad who'd fallen from the swing. "If I'd had another job to go to, I think I'd have gone home there and then."

It's the only sombre story in the book, entitled Call an Ambulance though it might have been Stretcher Point, perhaps. "Ambulancemen tend to forget the serious incidents. You have to have a sense of humour as well as a sense of compassion. Go to any ambulance station and it's the off-beat incidents they'll be talking about."

By September of his first year he'd gained a basic St John's first aid certificate ("it cost me seven shillings") though national training criteria weren't introduced until 1978.

He finished in 1992, having helped steer Cleveland to some of the country's best response times, but continued consultancy work that broadly involved massaging the ambulance service's image. "I did a lot of talks, told some funny stories. People asked why I didn't write a book."

The first ten publishers sent it back marked "Not For Resuscitation", or whatever the book trade equivalent. The next accepted it, though he still depends heavily on self-promotion. "I don't think we're talking Harry Potter," he concedes, though 26,000 words of the sequel are already committed to the computer.

He himself has never needed the ministrations of his former colleagues. "If I did, if my coronary came tomorrow, I'd be a lot more confident about surviving it than I would have been in 1965."

l Call an Ambulance by Alan Crosskill (Woodfield Publishing, Bognor Regis, £9.95)

TRAVELLERS' tales: former Butterknowle Brewery boss John Constable reports that during a "blissfully peaceful" week on Ibiza - "possible despite all we see on television" - he and his wife Sue chanced upon a remote restaurant in which "Manitas el cerdo" was dish of the day.

John has no Spanish, but his wife's smattering figured that "manitas" meant little hands. Pasta shapes, John suggested. Fish fingers, floated Sue.

The waiter, happily, was able to translate. Pigs' trotters, he said. They stuck to the salad, instead.

AT a party in Bishop Auckland we bump into Chris Foote Wood, long serving LibDem councillor, tilter at greater windmills and now on his bike as an enthusiastic (and successful) triathlete.

Chris, it later transpired, is planning a bit of a do of his own - 60 in December and with four months to go the invitations are already out for the bash in Bishop Town Hall.

Truly liberal, there'll be free food and entertainment and a pay bar. The invitation even carries an efficient little pro forma - yea or nay.

The column's, alas, seems to have been lost in the post. Another recipient, however, has sent his here - and with a hand-written comment on the top. Translated, it means that he won't be going, either.

BILLY Lynch, long time former landlord of the Central Borough in Darlington - among the town's few surviving street corner pubs - was toasted last week at a 5s and 3s tournament in his memory.

Walter Porritt won it the hard way, beating the column in the second round and Audrey Thompson, the organiser, in the final. Cruellest cut of all, the singularly hirsute Jimmy Monaghan - permanently attached to the same bar stool since 1958 - had his head shaved.

The evening raised £160 for the British Heart Foundation. Billy would have loved it.

LAST orders, and a final piece of taproom tittle-tattle from the Timothy Hackworth in Shildon. Straight over the road there's a filling station, long abandoned, being renovated by Clarendon Cars of Bishop Auckland.

Rush job, the quartet worked nearly 24 hours without changing gear, well turned midnight before the lights went on and gaffer Jack Redfern stepped back to marvel at how they'd motored.

Suddenly there was a tap on his shoulder - Eddie Martindale, the Hackworth's ever-observant landlord. "You've worked at that, I bet you could do with a drink," he said.

Thus it was that at 1am a tray with four pints of lager appeared - legally, and with compliments to the Great British Worker.

"They deserved it," says Ed. "You don't see a lot of graft these days."