THE Blessed Margaret, to some surprise, features just five times in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations which sits, inverted, on these shelves. It's the 1996 edition; the other feller doesn't even get a mention.

One of Lady Thatcher's more agreeable aphorisms is that no-one would have remembered the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - "he had money as well"; another is the curious line "We have become a grandmother".

A third was lifted from a speech to the American Bar Association in 1985: "We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend."

Though there are also sexual overtones - about which this column's gentle readers should properly be forewarned - it was doubtless to provide the oxygen of publicity that we were invited last Thursday to launch the Breathe Easy club in Bishop Auckland.

BROADLY to support those with respiratory disease, Breathe Easy clubs are organised by the British Lung Foundation. There are 120 nationally, 19 in the North-East and Yorkshire.

Bishop's will meet in the Methodist Church, opposite the General Hospital, on the second Thursday afternoon of each month.

Local GP James Carten also spoke, telling the story of the chap who complained to his doctor that he couldn't stop singing Green, Green Grass of Home.

"Oh dear," says the doc, "it sounds like you've got Tom Jones disease."

"Is this quite common?" asks the poor patient.

"Well," warbles the GP, "it's not unusual...."

They'd sent lots of advance literature, including a booklet on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - given capitals but hardly deserving of them - in which the eye is irresistibly drawn to pages 10-11, sub-headed "Sex".

You wouldn't believe the ways, or at least the ways around, the problem. Chiefly, however, we were taken by the following: "Using your blue reliever before sex can help build and maintain endurance. These inhalers are generally effective up to four hours."

We read it out loud and they felt better at once. The queue for blue relievers began at once.

l Details of the Bishop Auckland Breathe Easy club from Nurse Kathryn Brown (07786 572204) of from club chairman Anthony Roe - who plans a sponsored static bike ride - on (01388) 605764. The oxygen of publicity.

IT will be appreciated that this is the sort of column which regularly is assailed in the street to discuss pivotal issues of the day. Thus in Bishop last Thursday. "Just the man," says a stranger, "why was Milbank school in West Auckland known as Titty-bottle School?" No idea; readers may have. Suck it and see.

BACK in the office, Bishop Auckland breathing more easily by the minute, Nurse Brown rang to announce that we'd won a Seepeyhose in the raffle. In view of recent ulcerous outbreaks, we at once assumed it to be a surgical stocking.

It's not, it's a "flexible trickle irrigation system", made - says the box - on the St Helen industrial estate, half way been Bishop General and Titty-bottle school.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, we'd had a letter from a Bishop Auckland constituency Labour party member complaining at a would-be parliamentary candidate's use of "St Helen Auckland" on the grounds that it should be St Helen's.

Both are familiar. Does anyone know which is correct?

KNOWING the column's pork pie penchant, the Stokesley Stockbroker sends the story from a BBC website of last Saturday's wedding in Huddersfield between Joanne Robinson, 39, and 45-year-old Stuart Booth.

Instead of a wedding cake, they had a three-tier, 50lb growler.

"We've never heard of it before, certainly not a three-tier," said Simon Haigh, the butcher.

The groom, a founder member of the Ripponden-based Pork Pie Appreciation Society, has been known to dress in a Pork Pie Man suit to promote his favourite delicacy.

So what did his mother-in-law make of it all? "As long as I'm not wearing my Pork Pie Man suit for the wedding, she won't be bothered," he said.

STILL with finger on the pulse and teeth into the pastry, we hear from Ginsters - the pie and pasty people - of a claim to fame for one of the North-East's most traduced towns.

Claiming that 57 per cent of those surveyed couldn't pronounce the Cornish company's name - the 'g' is hard, as in gun metal - the survey also discovered that one of the English language's most mispronounced words is "pronunciation".

The most mangled are film, the letter 'H', mischievous, Holborn, athlete (presumably with three syllables, "film" only has two), etcetera, probably, library, prescription and - wait for it - Middlesbrough. The borough surveyor to blame.

FIVE days until the World Egg Jarping Championship at Peterlee Cricket Club and organiser Roy Simpson reckons the eggy argot runs only to the two words we discussed last week - dunch and jarp itself.

Pete Winstanley in Durham finds "jarp or jaup" in Collins - "North Eastern England dialect, to strike or smash, especially to break the shell of (an egg) at Easter"; Bryan Sykes in Northallerton points out that "jarp" is also listed in the Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore by Arnold Kellett. ("There's a nice Lancashsire/Yorkshire border surname for you.") They may jarp in Yorkshire, of course, but they won't be world class. The champion, as sure as eggs, will come from within two miles of Peterlee.

ARTFULLY attributed to "Dennis in the Brit", last week's column suggested major changes to late night bus services in the Darlington and Bishop Auckland areas.

"I'm surprised he didn't know," writes Marjorie Nicholson from Stanley Hill Top, "that the later evening services have been operated for some time by Go North-East and their timetable gives full details."

So it may. The Arriva timetable, meanwhile, simply ends half way through the evening, notes that additional services are provided by other operators and gives a telephone number.

Is this what's meant by integrated transport?

...and finally, back to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which in the entry for the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray - immediately before Margaret Thatcher - includes the following immortal lines from The Sorrows of Werther, written in 1855:

Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter;

Would you know he first he met her?

She was cutting bread and butter.

So who was poor Werther, why was he so sorrowful and is there any connection with the sweeties of the same name?

We'd set Mr Briggs to the task when the Internet conked out - or whatever is the technical term for such pesky malfunctions - and the column had to be sent comfortless to bed.

Original if nowt else, we hope next week to suck and see that one, an' all.

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Published: ??/??/2004