BUILDING from the top, the Brit boys fell to discussing the origins of the word clemmy, meaning "stone" or, possibly, "half-brick".

In the North-East these days it also has avoirdupois associations. A heavy man may be said to weigh 16 clem.

Though hedged about with clematis and clementine, the Oxford English offers nothing of substance. The word "clem", however, is chiefly taken to mean "pinched" or "contracted" - especially in the sense of pinched with hunger.

It's but a short etymological errand to "clamming", which any unfed 14-year-old now claims to be.

But why is a clemmy a stone? Bricks without straw, we continue.

INEVITABLY after all these years, all manner of MPs have crossed the column's primrose path.

There was Ted Fletcher, the left wing but generally quotable MP for Darlington, the dour Alex Lyon in York, the mischievous Mo Mowlam and her rubicund successor Vera Baird, the diligent Derek Foster, the sweet toothed Michael Fallon.

Even Tony is good for a little smile and a wave. He's very adept at it.

Fallon, a Conservative - how long ago it all seems - was the member for Darlington in the early 1980s. Did we ever tell the sweet and sour story of how, seeking sustenance, he downed five pints and five Mars bars in a session. Probably.

Then there was Michael Thomas, in 1970 the SDP MP for Newcastle East, who delighted in the tale of the Tyneside MP - we shall call him Geordie - who after two years without making his maiden speech was persuaded to rise to his feet following another pit closure on his patch.

Maybe it was nerves, maybe what euphemistically is called a lack of formal education. "This here pit closure," he began, "is gannin' to mean the crippilisation of my constituency."

Forever seeking accuracy, the Hansard clerk was perplexed. Next morning she tapped timorously on Geordie's office door.

"Excuse me," she began, "but did you really say crippilisation? I can't seem to find it in any of my dictionaries."

Geordie was a kindly soul, if nothing else. "Divvent thoo worry, pet," he said. "If you divvent understand lang words, just put it in invertebrate commas."

MANY have been acquaintances, only two have come close to being friends - the late Ernest Armstrong and his daughter Hilary, who in 1987 succeeded him as member for North-West Durham.

It's because Hilary is a friend - we'd attended her 60th birthday party before Christmas - that we write with trepidation of her troubled past week.

She's Government Chief Whip, almost universally blamed for Labour's defeats on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill - on one occasion by a single vote, allegedly after she told Tony Blair he needn't bother stirring himself.

"An interesting career move to say the least," observed Mr David Cameron. The national press was altogether more brutal, at least two papers claiming for her the nickname Squawker - "a noise like a howler monkey that has just hit its thumb with a hammer".

Hilary was variously described as shrewish and shame-faced, sycophantic and schoolmarmish, as crass, useless and intellectually deficient. Various "insiders" and anonymous MPs were paraded to paint a picture of a miserable, muddled and mean-spirited woman.

The Independent called her an excrescence. The Times, no less outrageously, supposed her a "desperate fishwife", adding ludicrously that she was proud of it. The Daily Mail employed 48pt type to attack her physical appearance.

Having survived for five years as Chief Whip, Hilary doesn't need the Gadfly column to defend her. Her skin must be as thick as the Busty seam at Billy Row colliery.

Those who know her, for all that, will vouch for her personality, her intelligence, her fair-mindedness, her friendship and her fun. She's also very proud of being a northern lass, and there's nothing the matter with that.

Though commentators suppose that her chances of survival akin to those of Sunderland, her favourite football team, she is likely - unlike her team - to escape the drop.

If ever it seems to her that the Chief Whip's office is little more than an exercise in self-flagellation, however, she may be assured of a white wine and a warm welcome in the Cow Tail - if ever we can find it open.

CARROT and stick, last week's column reproduced an Echo classified ad offering a "Chinese walking stick with eight immortals" and wondered what on earth it was all about.

The explanation comes from the Rev Terence Towers, Vicar of Ushaw Moor for 26 years until his retirement in 1993, and is best repeated in full:

"The eight Chinese immortals were the saints of Daoism, an ancient philosophy which taught that death was not the necessary accompaniment of life.

"The eight, seven men and one woman, achieved immortality by magic powers, or the use of alchemic potions, through meditation or by means of a diet of pearls and jade. They floated away to the Paradise of the Immortals, situated somewhere in the west.

"A walking stick carved with the immortals would be a suitable present for an elderly man, perhaps a scholar, with the implied wish that he might live long."

The scholarly Mr Towers is 72.

...and finally, the Stokesley Stockbroker calls attention to the third leader in last Friday's Guardian, in praise of Mr Donald Jackson.

Mr Jackson holds the glorious title of Queen's Scribe, responsible among other things for executing letters patent and royal charters.

He has also spent the last six years meticulously producing the first hand-written illuminated Bible since late medieval times, written with hand-carved quills made of goose, swan and turkey feathers.

Scribes, usually coupled with Pharisees, are best remembered as the sneaky, self-serving sinners of the New Testament, as in John, Chapter 8 when they sought Jesus's view on a woman "taken in adultery".

Verse seven: "So when they continued asking him, he lifted himself up and said unto them: He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her."

A regional variation would be about hoying the first clemmy. In the parliamentary press gallery they simply wouldn't understand.

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Published: ??/??/2004