There are seven days to go to polling in the Hartlepool by-election, but singing candidate Ronnie Carrol still isn't sure of his policies and recommends asking George.

A POTENTIAL high note in the Hartlepool by-election, heartthrob Sixties' singer Ronnie Carroll - best remembered for Roses Are Red, My Love - has joined the 14-strong list of candidates.

"In the constituency that voted for a monkey, they might see Ronnie as the organ grinder," says George Weiss, his agent. "Anything's possible in Hartlepool."

Ronald Cleghorn, as then he was, was born in Belfast in August 1934, thrown out of the church choir for singing Nymphs and Shepherds and broke into showbusiness with his improbable impression of Nat King Cole, boot-blacked to the eyeballs.

In 1959 he helped launch the pop programme Oh Boy with the 17-year-old Cliff Richard and with Marty Wilde, who had to leave it for pantomime in Stockton. "The first one and the last one," Wilde insisted.

Carroll married the comedienne Millicent Martin, was fourth in both the 1961 and 1962 Eurovision Song Contests - Ring-a-Ding Girl and Say Wonderful Things - but faded from the limelight soon afterwards.

Now he has recorded a 12 track album and, curiouser and curiouser, a cover version of Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air."

"Ronnie Carroll is in the process of being resurrected. We want people to know he's alive" says Weiss, and the two may have been made for one another.

"All I need is a big break," said Carroll in 1983, after being declared bankrupt for a second time with liabilities of £31,000 and assets of nothing whatsoever.

"Most idealistic people are skint," said Weiss some time thereafter. "I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money."

Weiss, long the leader of the Rainbow Alliance - by whatever name - famously won his legal claim to a house in which he had squatted for 20 years. He met the singer in a bowling alley in the 1960s.

Described on one of the websites as a "British eccentric", Weiss himself has contested many elections, standing simultaneously for all four Belfast seats in the 2001 general election but warned that he'd have to choose between them if successful in more than one. The problem never arose.

Carroll - Oh, Carroll - was a Rainbow candidate in last year's Uxbridge by-election, when they hoped to make the Guinness Book with the lowest vote in democratic history.

"We implored the good folk of Uxbridge not to vote for us but unfortunately 30 of them did," says Weiss. "Ronnie wanted to give up politics after that. There's nothing more demoralising than aiming low and missing."

This time, though the candidate is reluctant to give interviews - "My policies? You'll have to ask George," he said at Uxbridge - they're a bit more serious.

Residents of the Burbank Court sheltered housing scheme in Hartlepool were persuaded to sign Ronnie's nomination forms; he himself will be in town next Tuesday evening to sing to his newest fan club.

Votes apart, the perhaps ambitious aim is to sell 550,000 copies of the album by May 5 next year, on which occasion - 05/05/05 - Weiss hopes to persuade 550,000 people to take part in a "global experiment" in positive thinking.

Seven days to polling, and he's optimistic. "We've always claimed that sensible people won't vote in elections and that the non-voters are for us.

"That way we have a sweeping victory every time. It could happen again in Hartlepool."

GEORGE Weiss has been a Newcastle United fan since his dad took him to the 1952 cup final against Arsenal and they found themselves among the Geordies. "I just loved everything about them, still do," he says.

It wasn't primarily his Magpie loyalty which prompted him to apply for the Newcastle manager's job after Kevin Keegan was sacked, however, rather that the dole office was on his back.

"I was on benefits, still am, and they were nagging me about not applying for jobs."

William Hill's ungenerously offered 500-1 against his getting the St James' Park hot seat. Weiss laid £100 and warranted a piece in Sporting Life, taken down the dole to show how he really was seeking employment. He also offered United the entire £50,000 winnings to give him the job for a week.

"For some reason, I didn't have the courtesy of a reply," he says, though his greater regret came in the 1985 Tyne Bridge by-election when he believed he'd persuaded all-time hero Jackie Milburn to stand for the Rainbow Alliance.

"He was really up for it but the News of the World, who he was writing for, told him he shouldn't. Jackie could have won it for us; it was the biggest disappointment of my life."

HEART and sole, the remarkable John Robinson sets off on Saturday to climb Ben Nevis barefoot. As it tends to be in the western Highlands, the weather forecast's wet. "As yet we don't know how wet but it's a little bit worrying," says John, a martial arts expert who last year made a barefoot ascent of Scafell Pike.

This weekend's climb is sponsored for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, inspired by his former Shildon school mate Philip Steele who for many years has been an MS sufferer.

"He's a hell of a guy to have on your side," says Phil, a Crook based accountant with show business clients like Chubby Brown. ("Lovely feller, totally different from his stage presence.")

John, who operates a one man haulage business in Shildon, has been training in Teesdale. "I just hope to carry on where I left off at the top of Scafell Pike," he says.

Sponsorship donations can be sent c/o the column (Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF) or electronically via a website set up for that purpose - www.justgiving.com/barefootcrusader

The electronic target is £1,000: by Tuesday morning it stood at £64.10p. As might be said when standing barefoot at the foot of a 4,000ft mountain, there's still an awfully long way to go.

SELDOM Seen may rarely have had a much higher profile, following last week's column on Cyril Alington, the much celebrated Dean of Durham from 1933-51.

It was a hamlet near Newfield - west of Bishop Auckland - its existence immortalised at the start of Dean Alington's poem to Coronation Day 1936.

Shildon, Spennymoor, Shiney Row,

Pelaw, Pity Me, Seldom Seen....

John Coates and Elizabeth Sayers, 75 and 80 respectively, both remember it well.

Mrs Sayers, ladies first, recalls a single storey street surrounded by cornfields in which lived the Goundry, Wilson and Cooper families and a big chap called Tommer Scott who was boiler and buzzer man at the brick works.

Now in Spennymoor, Mrs Sayers lived in Newfield, recalls riverside walks wick with dragonfly and kingfisher. John Coates - belonged Willington, now in Newcastle - recalls wildlife of a rather less appealing nature.

"Seldom Seen was maybe ten houses and, across the river, a sewage works where the ash closets from all the surrounding villages would be emptied. There were rats bigger than dogs down there, honestly."

He also recalls John Tom Taylor, a bright lad from Seldom Seen who'd saved hard for university and was devastated when someone pinched all his money. "Lovely lad, no dummy, terrible shame."

Eric Wilkinson in Middleton-in-Teesdale points out a Seldom Seen farm on the edge of the village, though its etymology is uncertain; Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland finds both Seldom Seen and Never Seen on an 1861 Ordnance Survey map and, between them, Nutty Hag.

Paul's intrigued. Who, he wonders, was she?

... and finally, last week's column offered a copy of a new book on the painter Hans Holbein (by some feller called John North) to the first reader to supply his nationality. It' s on its way to Kenneth Ayre - "bit of a painter, bit of a wood carver" - on Stanley hill top. Holbein was German.