AS I write this column, I have no idea what fate has in store for Darlington Football Club. I hope there is a happy ending but I’ve been around long enough to know there may easily not be.

Whatever happens, I will never forget the events of last Wednesday when the life support machine was switched off, then turned back on again in the space of half an hour.

The most vivid memory of that day will be the sight of Shaun Campbell, businessman and football campaigner, screeching up in a car and running up to the stadium, dramatically waving a large holdall in the air, and shouting: “We’ve got the £50,000! We’ve got the money! They can’t close down the club.”

A surreal scene was played out in front of the waiting television cameras before Shaun was allowed inside to persuade administrator Harvey Madden to meet him and other members of the Darlington Football Club Rescue Group who have performed so admirably throughout the crisis.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is that during a break in the tense negotiations with Mr Madden in an upstairs room at the Blackwell Grange Hotel, I asked Shaun if there had really been £50,000 in cash inside his holdall.

He winked and smiled. “No,” he said. “But it looked the part, didn’t it?”

ERIC YOUNG, a lovely, gentle man with roots reaching back to County Durham’s pit community, also knew how to handle a crisis.

In 1976, when the Cod War was at its height, Eric, of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, was inside the British Embassy in Reykjavik in the dismal gloom of the Icelandic winter. A baying mob of 3,000 locals had broken through the gates and rocks were smashing through the windows of the consular section.

Eric answered the phone in the strong room on the first floor. It was the British press contingent, holed up in a nearby hotel, asking how he was coping.

Eric, the head of mission after diplomatic relations were cut off, calmly replied: “The kettle’s just boiled and we’re having a cup of tea.”

He was awarded the OBE for his services in Iceland and went on to become the High Commissioner of the Seychelles.

The story was part of a proud tribute paid by my good friend Ted Young – once a reporter with The Northern Echo – at his father’s funeral in the pretty Suffolk village of Sudbourne.

It was a privilege to be there and toast his memory at the Jolly Sailor in nearby Orford – with a nice cup of tea, of course.

AFTER the long drive south, I’d arrived in Suffolk a couple of hours early, having overestimated the journey time from the North-East.

I walked into the bar at the Jolly Sailor to relax before the funeral and the barman asked where I was from.

“Darlington,” I explained.

“Oh, isn’t that where you’ve got that safecracker for a football chairman?” he replied.

It shows the power of football to put a town on the map. But ten years down the line, how sad that George Reynolds is still what Darlington’s best known for in distant parts of the country.

SAFE-CRACKING chairmen, back-fromthe- dead deals with empty holdalls, tears of despair, tears of joy, When is it all going to be turned into a film?