'Getting on down' meant something entirely different to pitmen...and it's possible it was genetic.

"Blessed are they which do hunker and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled" - Matthew 5:6.

PADDY Burton from Sunniside, that former pit village set wondrously on a windy ridge above Crook, writes about sitting on his hunkers. It thus seemed appropriate to begin today's column - almost to begin it, anyway - with a verse from the Sermon on the Mount.

At one time half the North-East reposed on its hunkers, and found it entirely comfortable so to do. So did Paddy's forebears, and they were miners in south Yorkshire.

"My dad used to recall his grandfather, a pitman himself, squatting by the fireplace in preference to sitting on a chair," says Paddy, adding that for complete relaxation, the old lad would take out his teeth and carefully place them on the mantelpiece.

"I don't think his wife was ever very happy about that bit, mind," adds Paddy.

Paddy himself still sits on his hunkers - it may be genetic, he supposes, certainly it saves a wet backside - and swears there's a chap down the hill in Billy Row who'd wait for the bus in no other fashion.

"Do many people do this any more, I wonder? Have readers spotted any other examples of this rare breed (hunkerus collierensis) in its coalfield habitat, or possibly on annual migratory flights to the Mediterranean?"

Squat fettle? Sightings awaited.

HEALTH workers in the Easington district produced last November a guide for immigrant doctors called "Do you know your neb from your hunkers?"

Doubtless they know now, though whether yet sufficiently skilled to treat those who are out of fettle, nithered, coggly or simply a bit femmer, it is impossible to say.

THE Northern Echo has used the word "hunkers" just 15 times in the past two decades - mostly, as might be imagined, deployed by me.

There've been references to miners on their hunkers at Page Bank, to former Middlesbrough footballer Tony Mowbray on his hunkers on the Redcar branch flag of the Celtic Supporters Club and even to the broom cupboard manager's office at Scarborough FC being on its hunkers beneath the main stand.

A waitress at TFI Friday's at Teesside Retail Park had sat on her hunkers "like doctors do when they're about to break bad news". Few doctors, we added, wore a cowboy hat with a white fringe while undertaking so melancholy a duty.

Pitman painters Norman Cornish of Spennymoor and the late Tom McGuinness from Bishop Auckland have both represented subjects on their hunkers - but it would be wholly mistaken to suppose that it's a North-East expression.

The word "hunker" was originally Germanic, crossed to Scotland, and may also be defined as to "crouch on the haunches". Half the world's on its hunkers now.

A final thought while we're down that way. You remember the haka, that Maori tribal dance with which the All Blacks rugby team is supposed to strike mortal fear into their opponents?

Do you know what the big softies are really doing? They're sitting on their hunkers.

JUST 18 days before the great and glorious prohibition and Dick Fawcett in Redcar discovers that King James I had similar worries about the weed.

"Smoking," he wrote to the Earl of Dorset in 1604, "is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain and dangerous to the lungs."

Tobacco's chief users, added the king, were "ryotous and disordered persons of meane and base condition".

It got worse, the monarch railing against the inconvenience to the treasury from such substance misuse. It should be taken only in moderation in order to preserve health, said James - and so, of course, he put a tax on it.

It was the first government health warning. How come, asks Dick, it's taken those who followed him another 400 years to make the job complete?

ON the other hand... Northern Cross, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, reports the death of Fr Joseph Lennon who - like many more priests - had spent his last years in the Little Sisters of the Poor home in Newcastle.

Fr Lennon's eight North-East parishes included Consett, New Seaham, Ryhope and St Joseph's, Hartlepool. Mourners heard his eight-point plan for a happy life:

Love everyone.

See no wrong in anybody.

Give clothes and food to the poor.

Drink plenty of tea.

Eat only plain biscuits.

Have everyone to stay.

...then retire to the Little Sisters.

There's one missing. "Smoke as much as you can." Fr Lennon was 85.

UNORIGINAL but timely, comedian Terry Joyce wondered at the Crook and District Darts and Doms League's presentation on Monday night why, if smoking's supposed to be so bad for you, it still cures kippers.

LAST week's note on Biggles reminded the Stokesley Stockbroker of the days when he read those WE Johns stories to his young sons - and of the embarrassment when it came to the adult bits.

Biggles, it transpires, was pretty close to being a chain smoker - "whenever he lit another cigarette it was a cause of much sniggering among two under-tens in a non-smoking household".

We'd reported that 22 assorted Biggles volumes were to go under the hammer at Thomas Watson's auction house in Darlington. Sadly, the old lad came down to earth with a bump. They went for £30, the lot.

THOUGH several readers recall being on the wrong end of the phrase - last week's column - none has satisfactorily been able to explain what was so lackadaisical about being like one o'clock half struck.

Tony Stainthorpe in Durham, forever being compared to that incomplete bit of clockwork, remembers that when he did get himself into gear he was compared to hoss muck - "never off the roads".

Margery Burton, now in Shildon but brought up in Leeholme, near Bishop Auckland, recalls that whenever she wore an unimpressive new hat or outfit, her sister would say that she looked "like a cuckoo peeking out of a sink hole".

"I've never heard that one anywhere else," says Margery. "Maybe it was just Leeholme."

On other lackadaisical matters, Tim Stahl in Darlington denies that the phrase "languishing lazily" is in any way tautological. "Languish may be used to imply inactivity due to confinement or involuntary disuse. My Oxford supports this. It needn't mean you're lazy at all."

...and finally, Wendy Acres in Darlington rings not just about a Ceefax report - "a swan and her five signets" - but about a letter from the Bradford and Bingley headed "me and my savings" and without a capital letter in sight. "I spent 30 years teaching children that they couldn't say 'Me and my friend'," says Wendy. "I don't know why I bothered."

That's the fill for now, anyway. The incredible hunk returns next week.

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