EXCELLENT. The first email concerning this morning's Echo Memories drops into my inbox at 8.03am. It's about who put the Em into Emgate in Bedale.

The email's from Alan Macnab in Darlington and the answer's pretty simple.

He says: "Bedale Beck at the bottom of Emgate is the River Em. I lived in Bedale from 1955 to 1961 in the old Fleece Hotel (now no longer in existence) next to Asquith's The Butchers. I think it is a coffee shop now. I am enjoying reading your article." The only "em" I'd previously come across was a printers' em which was half the width of an en. In the old hot metal days, printers ascribed different values to headline letters depending on their widths and so the em became a measurement of width. There are still a few old people at the Echo who measure column widths in ems. Some of us even have metal em rules.

Em and en, both in the dictionary, are also extremely useful ways to use up letters in the last rounds of Scrabble.

But never before had I come into contact with Em as a river.

The all-seeing internet has, of course. But the only River Em it knows is in Sweden where it "is home to some of the largest sea trout in the world". A search on "Em and Bedale" doesn't return any direct hits, so it would appear that Alan's local knowledge is pre-google.