HERE’S a new year antidote – antidote, anecdote – to all the siren sounds about the ambulance service.

Of all the blessed places, it concerns the top end of Weardale, and a possible land speed record from Rookhope to the Freeman Hospital, yon side of Newcastle.

Fears have long been expressed about emergency provision in the dale, and the future of the little ambulance station at St John’s Chapel.

Such concerns were unknown to a middle-aged couple from north Tyneside who, last November, booked a weekend cottage in Rookhope.

They’d gone for the peace and quiet, not for the hullabaloo in the early hours of bonfire night. That’s when the lady had a suspected heart attack,

Holiday cottages tend not to have landlines. Rookhope hasn’t a mobile signal. Her husband drove to the village phone box, knowing that they were pretty much miles from anywhere and could be in for a very anxious wait.

The ambulance was there within 14 minutes. After 45 minutes working on their patient, the crew set off for the Freeman, a long and greatly winding road. Her dad, the column’s informant, suggests it was done in 35 minutes.

We ask a North East Ambulance spokesperson for a comment, suggest that first she look at a map. Readers may want to do the same.

NEAS confirms the story, says the journey took nearer 75 minutes, doesn’t know if it was the St John’s Chapel ambulance – “we just sent the nearest available” – insists that there are no plans to close St John’s Chapel station where an ambulance is double crewed 24 hours a day and a rapid response vehicle manned for 12.

County councillor John Shuttleworth, who lives in Rookhope, says: “It’s the luck of the draw. Sometimes that ambulance is out of Weardale, though it seems to have been around more recently. We still have concerns.”

It ends happily. Restored to full vigour, the lady returned to work yesterday. Last word to her dad: “Absolutely everyone has been magnificent.”

TOW Law on New Tear’s Eve proved really quite clement. The rain eased off, Storm Dylan not so much blowing as whispering in the wind.

We’d headed for the Hogmanay hills for what might be supposed a house cooling party. After withstanding for 39 years all that Tow Law could meteorologically throw at them, John and Jenny Flynn are heading to Broompark, near Durham, which may be considered more temperate.

“It’s only a dozen miles, but you can watch the car thermometer rising as you travel east,” Jenny insists.

Both were solicitors in Consett. “You got more house for your money in Tow Law,” says John, and no matter that when they moved in there was opencast mining out the back.

“We kept on getting free bags of coal. I thought it was kind of them until I realised they were 30 yards nearer our wall than their planning permission allowed.” Still they fuel two open fires.

The worst winter remains their first, that of 1978-79. Returning from Durham, they were still several miles from home when the road proved impassable. “We had to beg overnight shelter in a farmhouse, us on the floor and the baby in a drawer,” Jenny recalls. “We exchanged Christmas cards for quite a long time after that.”

John was Tow Law Town FC’s endlessly enthusiastic chairman when, immortally, they reached the FA Vase final at Wembley in 1998. Even the final programme described the west Durham town as “the Arctic of the North”.

There’s a photograph – “iconic,” he says, and for once the word’s unabused – of his celebration after an equalising semi-final goal at Taunton.

John, 68, still plays five-a-side football – “people call it walking football. We’re offended, we’re still trying to run” – while Jenny, two years his junior, is recovering from a knee replacement after catastrophe at the community centre ceilidh.

“I slipped and quite a few people fell on top of me, the heaviest first,” she says.

Both insist they’ve loved their time on windy ridge – but finally it’s too long a winter.

SERVICES to the community, Jenny Flynn was appointed MBE is 2001. She was 20 years on Tow Law council, 14 years chairwoman, vigorously involved in very much else. For others, recognition takes a little longer.

Lt Col Mordaunt Cohen, like the Flynns a solicitor, received the same honour in the latest New Year list for his work in making younger generations aware of the horrors of conflict, and of genocide.

A member of a leading Jewish family in Sunderland, he enlisted during the war after talking to German Jewish girls housed in a hostel on Wearside.

Initially with an artillery brigade on Redcar racecourse, he was posted to Burma where he commanded the 251 West African Heavy Anti-Aircraft Unit, a Jew who became known as the White Muslim.

Lt Col Mordaunt Cohen MBE is 101.

MORDAUNT COHEN was married to Judge Myrella Cohen QC, perhaps even better remembered in the North-East – at least among the region’s Crown Court defendants.

Fellow judge Denis Orde once commended a Durham police officer retiring after 30 years service. “Thirty years,” said Judge Orde, “sounds like one of Judge Cohen’s more merciful sentences.”

Judge Cohen, who shared her husband’s birth name, became the first woman barrister in Newcastle, the second Jewish woman to become a QC and, at 44, the country’s youngest circuit judge.

In 1983 she addressed speech day at Polam Hall girls’ school in Darlington. “Don’t be misled into burning your undergarments, taking part in torchlit processions or in revolutionary marches. What a woman needs to succeed is loyalty, hard work and determination.”

In 1992 she became one of the new Sunderland University’s first honorary degree recipients, alongside singer Dave Stewart and NW Durham MP Hilary Armstrong.

She died in 2002, aged 74, summed up in her Times obituary. “A formidable judge with a no-nonsense approach.”

SENTENCES could also become stiff when Judge Angus Stroyan presided on the North-East circuit. Once, it’s recalled, defence counsel had pleaded lengthily (and somewhat optimistically) on his man’s behalf.

“In conclusion,” he said, “I would respectfully suggest to your Honour that my client’s sentence be measured in months, not years.”

“Oh very well,” said Judge Stroyan, “you will go to prison for 60 months.”

A REAL sadness over Christmas to learn of the passing of Joe Anderson, former Mayor of Darlington and long serving, ever helpful, porter on Bank Top station.

“The best public relations executive the railways ever had, and on a leading railman’s wages,” one or other of these columns once observed.

We also supposed that Joe smoked like an A4 Pacific, but if he were an A4, he’d have steamed.

He was a west countryman, began working life as a clerk in a Plymouth solicitor’s office, soon switched to the railways. He loved the industry, despite losing a finger after a wartime shunting accident in London.

He came north in 1961 – “the best loved person on Darlington station,” another column supposed – and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the railways.

He retired in 1993, 65th birthday coinciding with the ruby anniversary of marriage to his wife Margaret, who predeceased him.

The retirement bash was held in the Cricketers, that wicket-shaped pub once familiar on the inner ring road. Joe Paterson, fellow railwayman and himself a former Labour mayor, turned up at the town’s cricket club instead.

Joe had ordered himself a drink before realising that he was at a social evening for Blue Link, an organisation for Tory young and beautiful. In time honoured fashion, he made his excuses and fled.