Of course it goes without saying - which is why I haven't said it so far - that renaming Teesside Airport Durham Tees Valley would be a ridiculous waste of time.

People do not travel to airports. They travel to places, sometimes arriving at an airport. While there might be good cultural reasons for renaming an airport, like honouring John Lennon by bestowing his name on Liverpool Airport, a new name is unlikely to attract a single additional traveller. It will certainly not draw significant extra numbers.

That much seems obvious. A special irony of the Durham Tees Valley proposal is that the airport's 'home' local authority, Darlington, has turned its back on Durham, whose boundaries have retreated to its border. Durham County Council is content with this arrangement not only here but on Tyne and Wear and Teesside, where the borders of the true Durham are also denied.

To some, this observation might simply echo a dead past. But the adoption of the Tees Valley tag by the authorities north of the river is a deliberate contemporary snub to Durham, ancient or modern. Yet if the name change goes through, 'Durham' will be the handle grasped by the outside world - or as much of it as deals with the airport.

The primary blunder, of course, is the name 'Tees Valley,' a misbegotten attempt to soften 'Teesside'. For donkeys' years few will know what or where it is. And when the penny drops, with 'Tees Valley' recognised as a synonymn for 'Teesside', the region will be back where it started. Barmy.

Did you spot it, the Big Mistake here last week?

The threshold for inheritance tax, which I stated to be £500,000, is £255,000. Above that, tax claims a whacking 40 per cent.

While assets willed to a husband or wife are tax free, on the death of the second partner the full tax is due. Through rising house prices, the tax now catches many who were not its intended target. This is why the Government needs to raise the inheritance tax threshold substantially.

Among readers who pointed out my error was one who also drew attention to what he considered the greater outrage of people having to sell their homes to pay for nursing care. Each year about 70,000 homes are sold for this purpose.

Since, a few years back, one of these was the home of my mother-in-law, medically deemed to need residential care, which swallowed virtually all the proceeds from the sale of her home, I should have picked this up. In Scotland, of course, the state funds nursing care for the elderly. But Tony Blair will be deaf to this in his Big Conversation.

Global warming? Perhaps. Great Broughton warming? Certainly. A primrose in my garden in the eponymous North Yorkshire village has been in flower for a fortnight. And blackcaps, once summer visitors to our shores, have wintered in the garden for the past two years.

Yet the British Trust for Ornithology is excited that the blackcap is now a winter resident in "a third of gardens in south-west England.'' Somehow, our North-East garden has become an outpost of the English Riviera.