Spider insider

Incey wincey spider climbed the water spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Incey wincey spider climbed the spout again.

SINCE last week’s Gadfly immodestly celebrated the column’s lucubration, it seems somehow appropriate that Ivor Wade should write – and, he says, to the fount of all knowledge – about arachnid kids’ stuff.

Ivor, from Darlington, is back from visiting his first grandchild down south. “Among the numerous books, and a CD, of nursery rhymes was a discrepancy in the name of the spider.”

Most supposed the little feller to be incey wincey. One book termed him ipsey wipsey. “We were surrounded by a newly-extended family and a slightly heated argument broke out over which was correct. Is it age-related, or perhaps a regional thing?” Ivor asks.

The only place to be a spider insider is, of course, the worldwide web. Old Incey even features in a dice game – very definitely Key Stage 1 – designed to improve infant mathematics.

Though there’s something about an ipsy-dypsy spider, that’s believed to be a mondegreen (Gadfly, passim) misheard by someone with a drink problem.

Incey wincey it is.

SPEAKING of dice games, Colin Jones, in Spennymoor, discovers on the Internet one called Oh Furcle that’s popular in Kasuria.

Kasuria seems to have something to do with dragons and dens but little with the real world. We may have been firkling long enough.

THEN there was Wincey Willis, still affectionately remembered as Tyne Tees Television’s weather girl in the Eighties and later – earlier – on TV-am.

Born Florence Winsome Dimmock, in Gateshead, she began her broadcasting career with Les Ross on Radio Tees, lived (memory suggests) on the former Winston railway station and became known for her love of animals and nature.

On her MySpace listing, she rather curiously describes herself as “the mulleted beauty from TV-am with a penchant for bad 80s knitwear”.

These days she has a Sunday radio show on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, writes, lectures on wildlife conservation, is an advanced scuba diver and has a wildlife blog, the latest instalment of which is devoted to mealworms.

“With the price of mealworms making fillet steak look like a cheap dish, it’s a good time to breed your own,” she supposes.

The mulleted beauty will be 61 next month. The MySpace entry which gives her age as 26 may be considered an incey-wincey mistake.

LINDA Chadd, in Darlington, sends a jobs ad – not even one of ours – for Café M, in Stockton.

“We are recruiting staff to fulfil a variety of rolls within the unit.”

Linda says that she knows unemployment is reaching serious levels – but that, she says, is just ridiculous.

BACK in December, we told the story of Ropner’s Navy, the extraordinary merchant fleet built up around Hartlepool by Prussian emigre Robert Ropner and his family.

If the Royal Navy were the senior service, Hartlepool folk reckoned Ropner’s Navy pretty much next in line.

The only family member I ever met was Jeremy, a member of the British bobsleigh team from 1960-62 and Conservative parliamentary candidate for Bishop Auckland in 1964 and 1966 – his progress on the second occasion followed by a cabbage-green young reporter from the Northern Despatch.

Fighting Bishop for the Tories must have made bobsleigh seem like downhill all the way.

Jeremy, who lived near Bedale, subsequently became chairman of the family firm and a bridge champion.

He died on June 25, aged 77, a thronged memorial service held last week at St Gregory’s church in Bedale.

A once-wet eared journalist remembers his courtesy most gratefully.

MORE crossed lines, Maurice Heslop, in Billingham, refers us to the list of “local” councils on page 6 of the new Teesside telephone directory. They are Adur, Brighton and Hove, Eastbourne, Horsham, Lewes, Mid Sussex, Rother and Wealden. In reality, all Maurice wanted was Stockton – every which way but Lewes.

LAST week’s column recalled the hoo-hah when a Great Train Robbery-themed pub called Busters opened in Darlington in 1995.

Chief among its memorabilia was a dud cheque for £2,631,784 – the robbery’s proceeds – sent from Brazil by Ronnie Biggs himself with a request that it be forwarded to British Rail so that bygones could be bygones.

Joe Wellthorpe, now in North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, remembers the row, the cheque and the landlady – “Darlington’s best looking” – and has no sympathy for Biggs. “It amazes me that people think this geriatric criminal should be released on the flimsiest excuse that he finds himself unwell.”

Janet Robinson and her late husband Eddie ran Busters for ten years.

“We were just sitting round one night wondering what to call it,” she remembers.

“Someone suggested Biggs’s, but that didn’t seem right as he was still on the run. Buster Edwards had been running a flower stall near Waterloo station.”

Having acquired some original front pages of the heist at Linslade Farm, she wrote to Biggs – “Ronnie Biggs, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” – and was somewhat surprised to get a reply. It can’t have been much of a hideout.

“He wrote a very nice letter, said how much he’d like to look in for a pint and enclosed the cheque,” says Janet.

Then, as now, the Biggs deal provoked strong emotions, especially among railwaymen. A visiting television crew gave Janet his telephone number in Rio. “When I rang him, he was really jovial, said he hadn’t meant to cause offence with the cheque and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about,” she recalls.

Janet’s still in Darlington, still has the cheque. Busters remains, too, though the chance of Ronnie Biggs strolling in for a pint appear more slender than ever.

MUCH of today’s column was written on the 1B (or not 1B) bus between Darlington and Tow Law and back. It should therefore be recorded a) that while it was pouring in Darlington the sun shone brightly on Tow Law and b) that chiefly because of road works in Bishop the outward trip took an hour and 40 minutes, even longer than usual. As a fellow traveller succinctly observed, it was all a bit of a clart.

…and finally to Durham, slightly hung-over last Sunday morning from the still-Biggish Meeting the previous day.

Faces spoke of a long back shift, posters of road closures and parking bans and, alongside the path down from the railway station, several hundred copies of Socialist Worker (80p) had indolently been dumped.

Doubtless a badge of honour, the Worker seems to change little. In letters two inches high, the front page headline proclaimed “Filthy rich want to cut your pay.”

The dilemma, bearing in mind one of Brother Marx’s best remembered aphorisms, was whether it would be right, or indeed legal, to take one.

It was, of course, reminiscent of the old joke about why Marxists only drink camomile tea. Because all proper tea is theft.