THE Good Doctor's was even busier than usual last Thursday, neither because they'd come out in sympathy with the column's endlessly ulcerated ankle - though grandmas' cures for that pestilential affliction are much welcomed - nor because they like his choice of fevered brow beating. The surgery plays Radio 2.

All was explained in the Bay Horse that evening. The village, concluded those still standing their round, was in the grip of the dreaded lurgy - "everyone's got the same cough".

It's a curious disease, the lurgy, sounding vaguely sub-tropical but essentially and almost insanely English.

Chambers Dictionary ignores it completely, as if it might catch something; a 1960s Pocket Oxford is equally unforthcoming. The excellent Bloomsbury English Dictionary (2004) pithily prescribes it as "any illness or infection", followed by the word "informal".

The Complete Oxford offers a helpful second opinion, however. Lurgy - "usually in the phrase 'The dreaded lurgy'" - is "a fictitious, highly infectious disease invented and made a byword by the Radio Goons".

Its first public appearance, indeed, was in the Radio Times of November 20, 1954. "Poor Arnold Fringe is suddenly stricken with the dreaded lurgy, and within a few days lurgy has claimed 9,000 victims".

There might almost have been as many sufferers in and around the Bay Horse. They got the lurgy from Spike Milligan.

THE other unfortunate thing about the lurgy, of course, is that it rhymes with almost nothing except Fergie. John Briggs in Darlington finds an Internet rhyme beginning:

Fergie was a Duchess and now she's just plain Fergie,

Imbued with all the warmth and charm of measles or the lurgy,

Although her public utterances cannot be described as "blithering",

They do invite the kind of look we once described as withering...

It goes on; we needn't.

MRS Briggs is presently in Los Angeles - it's snowing - from where she sends the latest US bulletin on health and nutrition.

* The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

l Mexicans eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans.

l The Chinese drink very little red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Americans.

l Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

l Germans drink lots of beer, eat lots of sausages and fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans,

Conclusion: eat and drink what you like. It's speaking English which kills you.

THE phrase "out of sorts", the way folk are when dread abed, was long supposed to have its origins in the metal boxes of type used by printers, in which each kind (or sort) was kept strictly in its own compartment.

As if by a printer's mallet, the idea is rather knocked on the head in a book called Port Out Starboard Home, which arrived amid the Christmas cornucopia.

Reflecting the present happy fascination with words, it's a sort of etymological bran tub which also examines phrases - as has the Gadfly column - like "the whole nine yards", "going for a Burton" and "cutting the mustard".

As ever, it was a good and generous Christmas and a welcome break. If only we could do something about this egregiously ulcerated ankle.

BOB James, who died on December 8 but whose obituary rather posthumously appeared in last Thursday's Times, would certainly have known about such sorts and conditions.

After eloquently reporting Darlington FC for both The Northern Echo and Northern Despatch in the early 1960s - at one time under the pseudonym Jack Darneton - Bob became one of the country's leading experts and teachers on type, typography and sub-editing.

At his annual eye test, The Times insisted, he struggled to make out the bottom line. "I can't read it," he informed the optician, "but I can tell you it's in Gill Sans Bold."

He was also renowned - "if sufficiently primed," added the obituary, euphemistically - for his leadership of late night sing-songs at Westminster Press weekend schools.

As a good Co Durham lad, his party piece was all 50 verses ("allegedly") of The Lambton Worm, written by C M Lemeune and first performed in 1867 at the Old Tyne Theatre.

Most versions of the tale of bold Sir John run only to six, each followed by the familiar chorus of wisht lads and aaful story. Are there really another 44 about the fearful worm? Elongation eagerly anticipated.

BOB James, his obituarist adds, also loved to sing The Junior Reporter by the late Alex Glasgow. Alex, who died in 2001, began his writing and broadcasting career on BBC Radio Newcastle, though latterly wasn't terribly fond of reporters, junior or otherwise. We can't find the venerable words, and would much welcome them.

AMONG Jack Darneton's pseudonymous colleagues in the days when so many of us were in the Pink was a lovely fellow called Nomis, otherwise David Simon, whose father was Nomis before him.

Nomis, as the alert will have understood, is Simon written backwards. David occasionally addressed me as Soma, for the same reason.

It was therefore of more than usual interest to read in the Telegraph last week that the wonderful hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (forgive our foolish ways) is but the final six verses of John Greenleaf Whittier's 17 verse epic called The Brewing of Soma, about a trance-inducing narcotic.

"The story," says one of the websites, "is of Vedic priests going into the forest and drinking themselves into a drunken stupor on a concoction called soma."

Chambers confirms its existence; Soma was even personified as a god. Senseless on soma or just reversible decline? Wherever will it end?

...and finally, in an attempt to make everyone feel a bit better, we are grateful to Horden FC's programme (no less) for the following:

Mahatma Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail, and with his odd diet he suffered from bad breath.

This made him a super callused fragile mystic plagued with halitosis.

Picture of health, the column returns next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk /news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2004