CRAMMING my Christmas cards into the pillar box the other day, I remembered how it is the lot of columnists at this time of year, and particularly on this kind of day, to write a seasonal column.

The one I'd been toying with was to be entitled "Snotting around the Christmas tree". I'm convinced that I am allergic to our real tree. When its cruel needles jab - and they can puncture their way through even the toughest wetsuit - they leave my skin in scratchy bumps, and ever since the damn tree's arrival I've been sneezing and wheezing.

Apparently, Bill Clinton suffers the same ordeal. Some people are allergic to the terpenes within the sap of the trees; others to the moulds on the bark. The best advice is to hose down the tree.

This, though, is rubbish advice because a) the tree currently stands on a carpet, with its lights plugged into the mains and with a lot of over-priced plastic in large cardboard boxes beneath it, and b) even if I wash down our tree, friends and neighbours would be a little miffed if I were to turn up at their parties armed with a hose and proceed to give their trees a good soaking before saying hello.

And, it is probably not the tree itself that is causing the sneezing but the decorations - they've been lying all year in the attic, collecting dust and housemites and now they've been shaken out in the living room.

Not much of a seasonal column, though, and anyway, I thought as I posted my cards, pillar boxes are much more interesting. Great things.

They were invented in Guernsey by the novelist Anthony Trollope who, in 1851, worked for the Post Office before becoming an author. They quickly spread to the mainland where, with the help of the Department of Science and Art, the Post Office created a masterpiece. It was hexagonal and covered in elaborate cast iron decorations.

But, crucially, they'd forgotten to put a hole in it for the letters to be posted through.

So someone grabbed a saw, looked at the decoration on the side and realised they'd ruin the box's aesthetic appeal if they cut through that, and so sliced through the top.

This was a major breakthrough in the mechanics of letter-posting but, with the slot open up to the skies, it explains why Christmas cards from 1857-59 arrived covered in rain and snow splashes.

FAR more interesting to return to last week's non-seasonal subject: executions. Last week was about murderer Mary Nicholson, executed in Durham in 1799. I've been contacted by a eighth generation descendant of one of those involved in the story. It should have been set in Newton Ketton - slightly to the north of Darlington - rather than in Archdeacon Newton.

His family's version, in which abused orphan housemaid Mary poisoned her master in Little Stainton, told that Mary was so remorseful that she took arsenic herself. "Within three days, she looked like a woman of 90," he says.

Most executions in Mary's day were carried out at Dryburn, probably on the hospital site. The very last person to be hanged there was Ann Crampton, 40, on August 25, 1814. Details are scarce, but the crime for which she swung was "cutting and maiming".

Apparently, she'd discovered her husband was two-timing her and so she'd sliced off his manhood. This was seen not just a damaging injury to him, but as a slight on the whole of the male-dominated society.

It'd certainly be enough to make Bill Clinton sneeze. Merry Christmas.

Published: 24/12/2005