I AM just back after a couple of days away on Holy Island. I am not religious, but the colours of the sunset last Wednesday evening, followed by an equally gorgeous sunrise, were enough to leave me speechless in wonder.

Yet throughout my break, a word was running round my head, a word I had never come across until a couple of weeks ago when I was researching the opening of Darlington Covered Market in 1864. My eye, as ever, tripped away from what it was supposed to be searching for and stumbled across the following paragraph in the Darlington and Stockton Times: "The Railway Station booking-office at Saltburn-by-the-Sea was burglariously entered late on Thursday... Next morning, when the ticket clerk went to his duties at about half-past five, he found the office door open, a pannel of which was cut out and the till forced open, and the contents (nearly £2) abstracted."

What a word, burglariously!

I presumed it was one of those verbose Victorian words whose popularity waned fairly quickly.

But a couple of days ago, while researching this coming Wednesday's Memories about a murder in Shildon in 1905, I came across this headline in The Northern Echo: "Burglarious Sybarites."

Two teenagers from Jarrow were accused of breaking into a house and "generally enjoying themselves" by consuming all the beer and stout they could find and sleeping in a bed before leaving with about £62 of property. The Echo said they "combiend a shady business with pleasure" and the secondary headline spoke of "a house that told a tale of nocturnal revels".

In ancient times, Sybaris was a Greek colony in Italy where the inhabitants were particularly fond of luxury, and so a Sybarite is one who is devoted to sensual vices.

And so someone who is so devoted to sensual vices that it causes him to break into another's property is clearly a "burglarious Sybarite".

Burglarious was popular enough in contemporary parlance for 40 years to appear in our newspapers: it really should make a comeback.