From Category D to A-list

What chiefly seemed to appeal was that beer was £1.32 a pint, though that can only have been in the Swan and Three Cygnets and the dear old Colpitts - both Sam Smith's pubs.

"Amazing. You're three pints to the good before having to break into your second fiver," enthused the Telegraph's man. He should have tried drinking in the Royal County.

The Telegraph also liked the "wonderfully romantic" riverside walks, the indoor market - "the pong of goats' cheese competing with the smell of fresh fish is quite delectable" - Durham Johnston School and the "knock-out residences" on South Street.

The paper wasn't so keen on the traffic congestion, the "dearth of top-notch hotels and restaurants"- a regret long echoed by the Eating Owt column - and the "less than ideal" social mix.

"Middle class southerners from the university rub up local youths the wrong way, and vice-versa. All that cheap beer starts to tell by Saturday night, when tribal rivalries come to the surface."

Lamentably, they didn't at all like Pity Me - "disappointingly drab and charmless".

All that's for information only, as they say in official circles. It's to the environs, aforesaid, that we now wish to return.

Bishop Auckland was described as "a bit scruffy round the edges" but - rather surprisingly - with "some stylish shops and eateries". Chester-le-Street was "a pleasing, compact town" and Sedgefield "half-way between a village and a town" where cottages had "Miss Marple" written all over them.

Then there was Witton Park. Remember Witton Park?

It's the former ironworks village a couple of miles west of Bishop Auckland which in the 1960s became the crucible of the bitter battle against Durham County Council's Category D plan.

Half feudal, half fascist, the policy decreed a lingering death for 121 County Durham villages. Locked in a municipal condemned cell, they were denied any form of sustenance or development. As inexorably as inevitably, each community would perish.

The county-wide policy was finally overturned because of a sustained, courageous and utterly indomitable fight by ordinary heroes like John Callaghan, Harold Hutchinson, Allen York and Maurice Dodds. New development in Witton Park was championed by men like the late and lamented Nick Beddow, the vicar.

Maybe their final triumph was hidden among the small print of Saturday's Telegraph. Witton Park, it said, was a "popular and much sought after area". Whoever could have dreamed of reading that in a national newspaper?

FROM our own columns, the ever-watchful Janet Murrell in Durham returns the classified ad (above right). From here it's a Chinese puzzle, but greater mortals than we may be able to explain it, illustrated or otherwise.

HOMEWARD last Tuesday on the 8pm from Kings Cross - mid-evening, mid-week and mid-winter but still almost every seat reserved and occupied.

In nine years, the number of passengers using GNER has risen from 11.9 million to 17 million. Not least in their marketing, they must be doing something right.

Three days later it was announced that, while Grand Central can run new London services from Sunderland and Teesside, GNER won't be allowed so much as an extra carriage.

Trains in China are now so overcrowded, reported the China Daily last week, that sales of adult nappies have risen by 50 per cent because it's impossible even to get to the toilet.

Some passengers have become so disorientated that they've thrown themselves out of the window. Unless the Government allows major funding to upgrade the East Coast Main Line, how long before it happens here?

WE have been discussing unfortunate errors, mainly in the media. Here is an example where the defendants may be assured of an absolute discharge.

Reporting the impending closure of West Witton Methodist chapel in Wensleydale, the Darlington & Stockton Times carried a late Victorian picture of the Walker family who - then as now - were chapel stalwarts.

The caption described one person in the photograph as "Unknown", which wasn't really the case. He had, in fact, correctly been identified as Mr Other Walker. "Other" was a family name, passed down the generations.

Though the D&S sub-editor understandably found it confusing, this was a significant Other.

THE term "significant other" is said to have become Civil Service currency to acknowledge "the growing tolerance of non-traditional domestic arrangements".

The 2004 Bloomsbury English Dictionary (£30, first rate) defines it both as "A spouse or somebody with whom a person has a long-term sexual relationship" and "An influential or supportive person in somebody's life."

Significant other should not, of course, be confused with AN Other, or indeed SO Else, who once frequently appeared in football reports in order to disguise the player's true identity. (The Scots still pull it, only AN Other has become "Trialist.")

Brian Hunt, author of the Northern League's magnificent history and also Durham County Cricket Club's scorer and statistician, reckons that an astonishing number of footballers seemed to be called A Newman.

In Victorian times, LBW Shout also became familiar on cricket score cards - "I've seen it several times in the Echo," says Brian. In that case, it must be true.

SIGNIFICANT or Otherwise, the gaffer is approached at a meeting of Sunderland RNLI Ladies Luncheon Club - where he's holding forth - by Irene Cameron Snowball. "I'm Mrs IC Snowball," she announces, proudly. Further examples of marital hitches much welcomed.

...and finally, recent columns have lamented the necessity of waiting for the homeward bus when it's karaoke night at the Nags Head in Darlington. The bus stop's about five feet from the microphone, only a sheet of glass to come between us. Though some found the column's notes a little sour, they weren't half as discordant as the karaoke. Now we note that a crack the size of a seismic crater has appeared in the self-same pub window. The charitable would blame a stone.

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Published: 01/02/2006