MEANDERING last Saturday afternoon along a minor road – a very minor road – in Teesdale, we came across a Chinese police tank. It’s not very often you get to write opening paragraphs like that.

The tank had clearly been there a long time, weeds and nettles growing all around it, the single gun pointing east.

There having been no reports of revolting peasants, or any other sort, in Barnard Castle’s broad bounds, it is impossible to explain what it was doing there.

Lest the finger (or the turret) point this way, it also seems rather unwise to reveal its exact location.

It’s a Chinese puzzle, nonetheless.

Any suggestions?

OFFERING congratulations to Sir Alan Meale – once an 11+ failure from Leeholme, near Bishop Auckland, now a knight of the realm – last week’s column noted that Sir Alan had returned the call too late for his thoughts to be included.

“A bit of a surprise, but my wife’s very happy. It’s lovely for her,” he admits.

His late mum, like his father a former Newton Aycliffe shop steward, would have been a bit chuffed, too.

“She came to all my counts, it was lovely,” says Sir Alan, Mansfield’s long-serving MP. “She’d have been proud as Punch.”

That his Honours List inclusion initially escaped local attention is, he guesses, because he was listed as Joseph Alan Meale. “I think my mum was an Alan Ladd fan.

“When old Father Milroy at St Joseph’s in Coundon asked what the child was to be called she said Alan.

Fr Milroy thought babies should be named after saints, so I become Joseph Alan. I’ve had to live with it all my life.”

He’s been an MP since 1987, vastly increasing his majority, has overseen 89,000 cases handled by his office.

“We still have every single bit of paper. It’s a bit of a nightmare,” he says.

The knighthood was happily accepted, though he already has a horse – or at least a share in one – trained by former Grand National winner Chris Grant near Hartlepool.

Had it been a peerage, he’d have declined.

“I’m a republican. The Lord’s has been suggested within the party, but I wouldn’t have gone.”

The honour, he guesses, may chiefly have been for his nine years service as War Graves Commissioner – appropriate because his grandfather died on the Somme and his father lost a leg at Dunkirk.

He’ll be 62 in July, hasn’t decided if it’ll be his last term, still grows leeks – “I have six, I don’t show them, I eat them” – still plans to retire back to south Durham.

“It’s still a good, positive feeling every time I come north across the Tees. Wherever it may be, it’ll be good one day to be back home.”

IN also acknowledging an MBE for former Durham mayor Mary Hawgood, 76, we’d noted that one of her ancestors was Walter Clibbon, a notorious Hertfordshire highwayman.

“My father used to tell me stories about this terrible ancestor,” says Alderman Hawgood.

“I didn’t really believe it until I was sitting in the dentist’s waiting room one day and opened a copy of Country Life. It was all over.”

Like some of Hertfordshire’s unfortunate 18th Century citizens, she now finds there’s no escape from the wretched Clibbon. “He’s in the tourist information centre now.”

HOLIDAY meant that I missed the death, on June 14, of the Right Reverend Ambrose Griffiths, pictured above, retired Roman Catholic Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle and a gentle, caring, everaccommodating priest.

We’d last seen him in 2006 at a party to mark the 50th anniversary of Northern Cross, the diocesan newspaper. On holiday a few weeks earlier in north Wales, we’d come across a van with the emblem “Ambrose Griffiths: window cleaner” but didn’t have a camera.

Not least because he was always a great supporter of Northern Cross, Bishop Ambrose thought it a pity.

“Just think,” he said, “what a lovely picture it would have made in the paper.”

IT’S flower festival time again.

Tomorrow at 7pm I shall officially be opening an All Things Bright and Beautiful-themed event – no connection there, then – at Witton Park Methodist Chapel near Bishop Auckland.

The chapel’s new, opened on February 29, 2008, and sufficiently small to mean that the opening must be by invitation only.

For the rest of the time – 10am to 4pm on Saturday and noon to 2pm on Sunday – visitors will be most welcome. The weekend closes at 2.30pm on Sunday with an open air service led by Shildon superintendent minister Graham Morgan.

Thereafter, Australian cricket legend Jeff Thomson is speaking at Shildon Railway Institute, but that’s another story.

…and finally, since much of today’s column has been written in the outer office – that is to say, on a picnic table in North Lodge Park in Darlington – it should be noted that the park’s 108th birthday party takes place this Sunday from 2p to 4pm.

Attractions include Cockerton Silver Band, Punch and Judy, steam engine rides and face painting. Children should be accompanied by an adult.

On July 17, the United Reformed Church in Northgate holds an open air service in the park at 10.30am. If it’s very wet, they concede, they’ll have to move inside.