ALL the dignatories are gathered around a table. The meal is coming to an end. The prospect of multi-million pound business hangs hopefully in the air.

There's His Excellency Mohammed Ali Alabbar of Dubai surrounded by his advisers; there are Middlesbrough's finest businessmen; there's Sir John Hall, the North-East's ambassador.

Ray Mallon, mayor of Middlesbrough, gets up to thank them all for enriching the Tees Valley with their presence - and possibly, one day with their Dubai dirhams.

He has a little gift for them, he says, and before he presents them with a sculpted piece of glass, he gives them all a trinket to remind them of the occasion. It's a cheap red lapel badge ("not suitable for children under three years - sharp point present").

And for the rest of the evening, they all - even Sir John - walk around proudly displaying the badge boasting of their encounter with the mayor.

In the middle of the badge is the Middlesbrough coat of arms which was designed in 1854 for the fledgling town by the Darlington historian W Hylton Longstaffe.

He stole the blue lion from the arms of Robert de Brus of Skelton, the 12th century founder of Middlesbrough Priory, and added some ships, some black to represent coal, and a star to boast of the connection with Captain James Cook.

Finally, Longstaffe needed a motto. He looked again at the de Brus arms. The motto was "Fuimus", which translates as "we have been".

Such retrospection was clearly not appropriate for this new expanding, exploding town, "the infant Hercules".

So Longstaffe picked up his dictionary, looked into the future and came up with "Erimus" - "we shall be".

As they wear in Dubai.

CONGRATULATIONS to Wendy Robertson on her new novel A Woman Scorned, and not just for successfully portraying Mary Ann Cotton as something other than the scheming, manipulating, poisoning, insurance-grabbing, child-killing mass-murderer that she undoubtedly was.

Beyond a vibrant tale - with vivid descriptions of Victorian West Auckland - Wendy uses a phrase that I thought was the creation of my six-year-old daughter's apparent obsession with root vegetables.

Most mornings for the past couple of years she has looked me up and down and then formally pronounced that in my suit I look "as smart as a carrot".

In the book, Mrs Cotton meets the local shopkeeper crossing the green wearing "a broad cloth coat with a jaunty daffodil in his buttonhole".

"So where is it, Thomas Riley?" she asks him. "Smart as a carrot, you are. Going to see the Queen are we?"

My colleague Mike Amos is a user of this umbelliferous analogy, and the only explanation we can come up with is that a carrot pulled out of the ground is covered in mud, but then it is scrubbed and scraped until is it presentable for the pot.

Proud and upright, shaved freshly and with its green hair tidily trimmed, it really is as smart as a carrot.