You segsy things

Remember segs, the joy of segs? They were those little things hammered into the toe and heel of boots both to make them last longer and to send sparks flying across the unreconstructed playground.

John Briggs, now in Darlington but a Sunderland lad originally, used at school to call them Blakeys, after the company which made them. Mrs Briggs, who is American, knew them as cleats.

Scottish bairns like Oor Wullie kicked carefree around in tacketty boots, or boots which were tackitt and seggitt, and doubtless one of our Scottish correspondents will be able to explain the difference.

Though Chambers Dictionary will have no truck with the word, the Oxford defines a seg as an animal which has been castrated when fully grown, a piece of hardened skin or a shoe strengthener - a contraction, it says, of segment.

Despite the universal popularity of trainers, personal and otherwise, Blakeys are still in Leeds - near the prison - and after 102 years still making segs. "Small but perfectly formed," they insist.

Since they now make much else, and export to 40 countries, the company is now called Pennine Castings - a casting of thousands - however. A peppering of Pennine Castings in your boot may not sound the same but, as probably they used to say in Sunderland, seggers can't be choosers.

SINCE today's column is made to last, readers will know that the derogatory phrase "a load of cobblers" is short for "cobblers' awls", which in turn is rhyming slang for... you get the picture, anyway.

But what of the relatively recent "dog's bollocks", meaning something which is supreme?

Mr Briggs, whose influence upon today's column has been substantial, offers the intriguing thought that the etymology is from Meccano, the construction kit which originally had two different formats.

The cheaper edition was known as "Box standard", which in time became "bog standard"; the more expensive "Box deluxe" was translated into "Dog's bollocks."

Gadfly readers, simply incomparable, may have versions of their own.

PUBLISHED last year, Ray Puxley's "uncensored" A-Z of British Slang (Robson Books, £16.95) includes "dog's bollocks" but without attempting an explanation.

On the same page, there's also a reference to "Doggett's coat and badge", a four and a half mile Thames rowing race between London Bridge and Cadogan Pier in Chelsea which is said to be the oldest annual sporting event in Britain.

"Coat and badge" has become Cockney rhyming slang for "cadge", so that people on the scrounge are said - in those southern parts, anyway - to be "on the Doggett's".

All of which leads us inexorably back to Bishop Auckland...

OVER the past month or so, we have been sharing generally affectionate memories of Doggart's store in Bishop and of its dozen or so branches throughout the North-East, closed simultaneously in 1981.

Neville Hare, who has been reading it all (he says) with "great relish", now wonders if it's time for the staff of those dispersed department stores to come together for a retailers' reunion.

Neville was also a "Doggart's dummy", worked for three years in Bishop Auckland in the 1960s, recalls it as a cross between Grace Brothers and Carry On Serving.

"Men who worked in a shop could have a camp image in those days but being alongside the best looking girls in Bishop Auckland carried a few perks."

He also remembers the segregated staff restaurant - bosses and workers, men and women - the inch perfect pecking order and, most vividly of all, the sales.

"We always had early bird reductions to start the sale and by opening time, queues had built up well down the street. As the doors opened a huge roar erupted, like a goal being scored, from both customers and staff.

"Our knees and the floor seemed to tremble as people poured in. Every floor, every department, was mayhem."

So, of course, Neville could go on. Part of the reunion? He's at 4 Rossway, Darlington DL1 3RD , telephone (01325) 269035.

SO once segs had been exhausted - and how soon the flame of love can die - the conversation turned (as it tends to do) to where babies come from.

The three most popular theories are that, suitably colour coded, they were dropped down the chimney by the stork - originally a German legend, apparently - that the doctor brought the bairn in his kit bag or that the poor wee thing was found beneath a gooseberry bush, a fanciful notion rather discounted by one of the websites.

"These days it is very unwise to encourage any rooting around under bushes," it says. "You're unlikely to pick up anything other than unused needles and hepatitis B."

How Not To Say What You Mean (Oxford, 2000) supposes, however, that it was only baby boys who were found beneath gooseberry bushes. Girls could be discovered in parsley beds.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Euphemisms (2000 paperback, £6 99), has a chapter headed "Sex" - not to be confused with segs - which under the sub-heading "Childbirth" labours both painfully and protractedly.

The Americans, it says, have even invented a verb "to stork", meaning to make pregnant, but we all know what a funny lot the Americans are, don't we?

STORK margarine, launched here in 1920 and still spreading, is perhaps best remembered for its "Stork from butter" commercials and for the subsequent ads fronted by Bruce Forsyth and the late Leslie Crowther.

It's perhaps timely, therefore, that Peter Crawforth from Chilton, near Ferryhill, writes to lament the absence of thin sliced bread from his part of the world.

"How are we to have afternoon tea on the lawn after the croquet match when we have no thin sliced bread to go with our wafer sliced cucumber and Earl Grey tea?" he asks, and adds for good measure that he wonders what the world's coming to.

What, indeed. Sole concessionary, we follow the example of Ecclesiastes 11:1 and cast more bread upon the waters next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/

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