Gadfly: The wrong rodent, but not getting ratty

As Mr D Manning in Stockton-on-Tees observantly points out, it was actually an image of Errol, aforesaid.

Both were associates of Roland Rat, a slightly unsavoury character born in a sewer near Kings Cross railway station but credited in the 1980s with saving TV-am and, thus, the broadcasting career of Mr Greg Dyke.

When the rats were leaving the sinking ship, it has been remarked, Greg Dyke put one on the telly.

Kevin the Gerbil was a Leeds-born rodent and Roland groupie, also noted for an unhealthy obsession with a pink bucket. Errol was Welsh and thus querulous, particularly fond of leeks, male voice choirs and Tom Jones - not unusual - given to running VT and to not seeing the point of it all.

It was said of poor Errol that he'd probably have been happier on Songs of Praise. He and the Tyke gerbil should not have been confused.

THE impressionable innocents with whom we watched Roland Rat are now both at university and on Saturday mornings, watch Soccer AM, Sky TV, instead.

It features someone called The Geordie Dancer, described as unique, inimitable and (as was Roland, though usually by himself) a superstar.

The Dancer is 33-year-old "supermarket worker" David Johnson from Witton Gilbert, near Durham, who wears a Newcastle United shirt, is overweight, myopic, falls about, appears about as cool as a Dorman Long blast furnace and may be oblivious to the fact that someone's taking the mickey.

He'd been spotted at The Vaults pub in Newcastle's Bigg Market, gyrated before the Newcastle-Middlesbrough derby in February, and has become a regular on Soccer AM.

Last week he appeared at Moonies Fun Bar in Pewsey, Wiltshire, who'd won a competition for his services. On other occasions they have pole dancers; Pewsey may not be choosy.

"Even football stars like Beckham and Owen could not have wooed bigger crowds," enthused the local paper, adding that it was the first time Mr Johnson had been outside Newcastle.

The highlight, however, appeared not to be caught by Sky's cameras but by CCTV in the pub garden. Coming in from the cold, the Geordie Dancer had walked slap into a door.

Now, adds his website - oh aye, and there's an "agony uncle" service to follow - the whole incident is available on video. If this is the music of time, the column is even more fearfully out of step than hitherto had been supposed.

FOLLOWING last week's note on 2004 workplace vocabulary, Tim Stahl in Darlington kindly suggests "amosmosis" - "the process by which some people absorb useless but charmingly presented information". His greater hit, however, is a collective noun for those ever more familiar souls who collect, surreptitiously snatching serial cigarettes, outside the front doors of offices where smoking is now banned.

It is, of course, a confagration.

UNDER the headline "Battle over name sign stepped up", Saturday's paper reported something of an identity crisis in Piercebridge, near Darlington, on the northern bank of the Tees. Trouble is, the village is perceived to have a foot in more than one camp,. Roman or otherwise.

"We have a duplicity of parish councils, MPs, bishoprics and so on," said Piercebridge resident Brian Jefferson, thus raising eyebrows as far away as Durham.

Such double dealing seems unfair on parish councils, writes Ian Forsyth, and possibly even on bishops - "but a duplicity of MPs; I think I'd go along with that".

THE Tees also formed a natural border, we said last week, in the use of the words "spelk" and "plodge" (north bankers) and "spell" and "splodge", as preferred by those from southern shores.

Pattie Smallwood, brought up on the Durham bank in Stockton, insists however, that they went splodging and - a bit brazzend, this - that she once got a spell in her backside after making a slide from an old table. Ethel Dobson, fetched up in Houghton-le-Spring, thought spells were something that Sooty did on television, though she'd had any amount of spelks. Dead wood, anyway.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes all four, and without taking sides. We remain, it is to be feared, in the dialectal clarts.

MORE on life's ups and downs, and Mr C H Johnson in Darlington adds biblical authority to his train spotter's belief that journeys to a capital city are always "up". Luke 2:42: "When he was 12 years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast."

Les Wilson in Guisborough agrees, recalling a long broadcast Radio Times headline: "Up to London for the brass bandsmen's cup final." What puzzles Mr Johnson is that undergraduates always go "up" to university and, older and infinitely wiser, come "down" again three years later. The dilemma won't change his life. "I shall," he writes, "continue to enjoy your columns, nonetheless."

LAST week's flirtation with anagrams offered too many easy pickings. There are websites, inch thick books - Ian Botham: Oh man! I bat -devoted to the things.

A lady calling herself the Mad Axewoman of Darlington rang to suggest that the Romans believed that name anagrams had occult significance - Tony Blair: I'm Tory Plan B might be the most familiar - while we were particularly, apolitically grateful for Phil Westberg's Budget Day e-mail from South Africa. Houses of Parliament: loonies far up Thames.

...and finally, a note for all those who've ever wondered what goes on in that holy of holies, the church vestry. On Sunday at Crook Methodist Church the three occupants - Dr Neil Richardson, president of the Methodist Conference, the Rev Graham Carter, chairman of the Darlington Methodist District and Gadfly (Church of Shildon) - were discussing the meaning of the term "cack-handed".

Dr Richardson eruditely supposed its origins to be Greek; Mr Carter believed that - like so much else - its roots might lie in Scandinavia.

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, insists that it is from the Latin verb cacere. Genteel readers can doubtless work it out for themselves.

PS Mr D Manning is member No 412 of the Roland Rat Official Fan Club. Whether there was ever a 413th, we have been wholly unable to discover.