IF you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

I'm laid up back in bed. You may be following my travails with my knees - a bit taken out of the right and implanted into the left along with a large amount of polyester - but after a brief rally, things have taken a turn for the worse.

I've pulled the calf muscle in the back of my good(ish) right leg. It's far more painful than any of the surgeon's slicings and won't bear any weight at all, even though it is supposed to be bearing the weight for two.

I did very bravely make it out my physio in Hurworth yesterday and, knowing that I have this blog to update, hobbled off in search of material.

And there, extraordinarily easy to spot, was John Hunter's grave. There are lots of Hunters in All Saints churchyard, but I knew it was he because it says "mathematician".

Hunter, of course, was William Emerson's pupil and friend and fellow sundial maker. There's a great story about how he won the heart of his girlfriend, Eleanor Marr (who shares his headstone).

John had obviously heard his friend doing his astronomical sums and concluding that something special was about to happen in the skies, so to impress his bird, John said he would make the stars move for her.

He sat her down with the nightsky laid out before her, and told her to keep her eyes peeled.

Sure enough, the clouds cleared and she saw stars swooping and diving across the dark sky.

And she was deeply impressed.

But then she asked him to put it back up again. After all, if the stars kept tumbling from the heavens at such a rate, there would soon be no stars left for anyone else to wish upon.

So John rushed off to Emerson to seek some advice. Emerson, though, was angry. How dare Hunter be so foolish as to try to make the sky fall in? The master conjured up a spell to set the stars aright, and rebuked his pupil: "It is most fortunate that I am in time to remedy the mischief as otherwise all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood would have been consumed to ashes in their beds before morning."

John left, swearing to leave the stars to Emerson - although the maestro would have been kinder to have told his pupil that he'd just witnessed the Northern Lights, an entirely natural phenomenon.

Still, it worked a trick for John and he married Eleanor on November 24, 1738, in All Saints Church.

The last time Echo Memories told this story (more than 15 years ago), it encouraged a reader to research her family tree and she discovered that she was John and Eleanor's great-great-great-great-grand-daughter, and still the generations are rolling.

And to think it all started on that starry, starry night.