Mike Amos

Lions bookshop still doing a roaring trade

3:16pm Wednesday 3rd July 2019

A BOOKSHOP in which nothing costs more than 50p and where much represents an extraordinary bargain is marking 25 years at its present premises.

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Mike Amos: Something in the air

6:30pm Tuesday 11th June 2019

TORNADO, the Darlington dreadnought, has been enjoying life on the fast line. Tornado Telegraph tells of the 21st century steam engine galloping from Leicester to Holyhead, from North Road to Chester on a circuitous route via 49 junctions and of blasting at 62mph over the formidable Shap Summit in Cumbria, a heritage steam speed record.

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Scrambling club

5:00am Saturday 8th June 2019

AMID the glorious plains of Bishop Auckland Golf Club there’s a Texas scramble and shotgun start, appropriate because the day’s beneficiary is himself Texan.

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Swaledale: the squeeze

5:00am Wednesday 5th June 2019

GUNNERSIDE’S glorious, galleried Methodist church – now the only chapel in a dale which once had a dozen – may best be known for its services marking mid-summer and mid-winter days.

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'People are talking about moving out' over Witton Park bridge closure

5:10am Wednesday 29th May 2019

SALUTED worldwide, Witton Park was at the heart of the protracted, but ultimately successful battle against Category D, a Durham County Council “no development” policy which condemned 121 communities to a slow death.

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Pot luck

2:30pm Wednesday 15th May 2019

ATTENTIVE readers will know that these columns’ favourite word is serendipity, a five-syllable construction meaning jam.

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Mike Amos: Musical moments with some refreshing stops

5:00am Wednesday 8th May 2019

DANBY Wiske is one of four villages – Appleton, Kirby and Newby alphabetically the others – which take the second part of their name from the river which mooches through that part of north North Yorkshire.

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Inside stories

5:00am Wednesday 1st May 2019

WHEN it comes to Her Majesty’s prisons, this column’s not so much recidivist as damn-near institutionalised.

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Up at dawn, but always in time for breakfast

5:00am Wednesday 24th April 2019

IT’S 4.15am on the clock and 10 degrees on the thermometer when we leave home on a moonlit Easter morning. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s still ten degrees 75 minutes later, 2,000ft up on Middlehope Moor.

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Mike Amos joins the Barney army

12:00pm Wednesday 3rd April 2019

ON August 18 last year, we wrote of a two-man Edinburgh Fringe show – BBC Tees presenter Bob Fischer, 47, and 31-year-old Gateshead-based television producer Andrew Smith – in undiluted appreciation of Last of the Summer Wine.

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Mike Amos: Walking the walk - the column bids farewell to three friends

5:00am Wednesday 27th March 2019

DAVID CHARLESWORTH, a very good friend to these columns and to Chris Lloyd’s, has died. He was 66.

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Daley record

5:03am Saturday 23rd March 2019

ONCE voted the biggest waste of money in football history, and dining out on it pretty much ever since, Steve Daley pitched up the other evening at a sportsmen’s do at Tow Law Town.

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Buzzing over a restored Brooklands Mosquito

4:59am Wednesday 13th March 2019

FIFTY years and a day since aviation pioneer Ernie Brooks crashed to his death at Teesside Airport, a restored Brooklands Mosquito was again seen outside hangar number two on Sunday.

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Banner in the works

5:00am Wednesday 6th March 2019

SHILDON Wagon Works, known thereabouts as the Shops, closed 35 years ago with the loss of 2,500 jobs and the sound of breaking eggs, all in the same basket.

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Perfect crime scene for a murder mystery night

12:20pm Wednesday 27th February 2019

IF you’re going to attend a murder mystery night, which we have for the first time, there may be no more appropriate crime scene than the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate.

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Litter louts appear to prefer Fosters

5:00am Wednesday 20th February 2019

ON St Valentine’s Day – don’t you just love it – the column joined a litter picking patrol. The collective effort was commendable, the revelation loathsome. In short, we are verminous.

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Toby or not Toby – an important question over breakfast

1:00pm Wednesday 6th February 2019

THAT is the question, and one that is much debated in this family. Which is better, the bairns endlessly argue, the Wetherspoons breakfast in all its preternatural permutations or the Toby Carvery’s “eat as much as you like” offer, choices including “breakfast” Yorkshire puddings and “breakfast” gravy.

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Remembering Liverpool legend Bob Paisley - born in a pit terrace in Hetton-le-Hole 100 years ago

5:00am Sunday 3rd February 2019

BOB PAISLEY was born in a pit terrace in Hetton-le-Hole 100 years ago last Wednesday. Liverpool pushed the commemorative boat out, ferry across the Mersey. Save for a mayoral mention before the town council meeting, Hetton did nothing.

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Crossing the borders by bus

5:00am Wednesday 30th January 2019

ON the day that Arriva bus bosses met the drivers’ union in an attempt to avert another strike, the column put Plan B into operation.

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Star struck by a County Durham vicar

5:00am Wednesday 9th January 2019

CHRISTMAS overflowed, as always it does hereabouts. Stockinged surprises included A Field Guide to the English Clergy, a greatly entertaining – some might say irreverent – volume which relies heavily on the adage that it’s awfully hard to libel the dead.

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