THE canny consultant brought into the Monday lunchtime planning meeting the programme for this year's Swaledale Festival, including on June 4, the Morris Festival Day. He was beside himself with indifference.

Though it sounds simply wonderful from down here - a dance to the music of timelessness culminating around 4.30pm with a sort of mass stomp on Reeth village green - Morris, minor or major, attracts a press which is almost universally, unreservedly, sneeringly demeaning.

Poor Arnold Ridley's arthritic efforts on Dads' Army probably did little to wave the handkerchief.

Swaledale will have longsword and rapper teams, Cotswold Morris and Border Morris, Rural Felicity Garland Dancers, Sticks-in-the-Mud and even two visiting teams from North Carolina.

Then there's John Morris, who played cricket for Durham and England, Sir Bill Morris who leads the AUEW and the Rev Marcus Morris, who gave the 1950s comics like Eagle, Girl and Swift.

Nor may many know that the band Madness was once known as Morris and the Minors.

Readers may be able to suggest other worthies with that Christian or surname. Long before that glorious summer Saturday in Swaledale, it's time for the Morris men to fight back.

HATCHED barely three months after the Christmas presents were unwrapped, Easter came so early this year that the column was reporting on the World Egg Jarping championships before March was out.

The annual event is held in Peterlee Cricket Club, usually won by someone living barely a short run away and this year attracting a disappointing 16 entrants. Not, perhaps, all it's cracked up to be.

At the Australian in Howden-le-Wear, meanwhile, a record 51 competitors knocked big and little ends out of 102 eggs - 101, more like - before Bradley Burn, aged four, became the youngest champ in the competition's 31 year history.

Organiser Dave Quinn, the local councillor, reckons that the jarper who travelled furthest to go work on an egg was 1984 champion Brian Young from Royston, Herts.

Paul Clarke, the only three time winner, lives a bit closer to home, in Howden High Street.

While on holiday last week, we perchance bumped into Roy Simpson, who organises the Peterlee head to head, in the Three Horse Shoes at Running Waters, east of Durham.

Told of Howden-le-Wear's claim to global supremacy, Roy was commendably magnanimous - as doubtless they say in jarping circles, it's a very small world.

THE Australian, on any account, is a funny name for a street corner pub in a former colliery village near Crook.

Its origins, says the column's esteemed colleague Chris Lloyd, lie with William Walton, a local lad who in the 1860s, took his family to Australia to seek their fortune.

It couldn't really be called the gold rush, because the voyage took eight months.

For two years, so the story goes, everything was dead pan. In desperation, Walton abandoned his religious beliefs, sought gold on a Sunday and was rewarded with a pile of nuggets worth more than £1m on today's values.

Home again, he opened a coal mine and, around 1874, built the pub he named The Australian.

Willie Walton was not only notably generous, however - giving most of his nuggets away - but, as Chris Lloyd reports, was the pub's best customer.

When he died he left just £100. The golden age was over.

NOT every instance of failing to remember the Sabbath - from a Hebrew word literally meaning to stop working - has had such immediate reward.

The latest Albany Northern League magazine - if ever it hits the streets - tells how church going Paul Stalker, now a well respected referee, back heeled the fourth commandment one Sunday in 1986 to play for his Middlesbrough side at Staithes.

Paul broke his leg, the referee missed the challenge and didn't even give a foul. The poor lad's been on his knees ever since.

THE much publicised decision of Station Taxis in Darlington to seek drivers in Czechoslovakia irresistibly recalls an episode several years ago when one of that company's best customers - known to like a pint and to reach those parts of the North-East which other journalists cannot - rang for an 11.15pm lift home from the Timothy Hackworth in Shildon.

Almost an hour and several telephone calls later, there was still no sign of the taxi. "He's waiting outside for you," the controller insisted.

Finally it was established that, while the meter was indeed ticking over, the cab was outside the Timothy Hackworth museum - closed for the night seven hours earlier - while the impatient customer was outside the Timothy Hackworth public house, a mile in another direction.

And that driver was born and bred in Darlington.

FOR reasons long forgotten, we have been dwelling upon William Makepeace Thackeray and Werther, original or otherwise.

"Brilliant," writes Barry Lee - "the 'ancient' in Norton and Stockton Ancients" - while Dr Margaret Ray of the University of Durham history department goes into a little more detail.

The lovelorn Werther, she says, is Thackeray himself - helplessly smitten by Jane Brookfield, wife of the Rev William Henry Brookfield.

Unlike Werther, happily, Thackeray didn't "blow his silly brains out". The shooting, says Margaret, was simply artistic licence.

WE'D also been grumbling that companies covering the same bus route - one daytime, one evening - issued separate timetables.

Mr R Dowding in Durham had the same problem, was advised at Durham bus station that they only had the Arriva timetable and that he'd have to travel to Chester-le-Street or Consett for a Go North East equivalent.

He went to Chester-le-Street on Saturday. The office was closed. Mr Dowding echoes the column: "Is this what they mean by integrated transport?"

...and finally, our last column echoed Pete Crawforth's puzzlement after coming across a pair of handcuffs in a camping shop in Cornwall.

"I think we just have to accept that it's very much another country once you cross the Tamar," writes Kevin O'Beirne in Sunderland, recalling that in a hardware store in Looe, he once discovered a big box of leather whips, £1.50 apiece.

"Of course I bought one and still have it," says Kevin, without disclosing the purpose to which it is put or, indeed, whether he still has the top.

Kevin's email also noted that, via Ebay, his Frankenstein Sound Lab website was offering a dictionary of unusual words - Call My Bluff stuff - which we've now bought for £1.75.

If enough interest can be whipped up, more of that next time.

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Published: ??/??/2004