Tornado at the end of the pier

Ian Forsyth in Durham ingeniously offers misspelt youth - "any school leaver today" - while John Briggs in Darlington suggests omnipitent, "being cheeky to a bus driver". (North-East folk will understand.)

John also nominates anamosity - "taking offence to something in any of your columns."

Impossible, of course. Read gently on.

IN the belief that what goes around comes around, or whatever it is that a tornado does, we have finally caught up with Ray Randall - lovely feller, it transpires.

Ray was one of the Tornados, though not in the original band which in 1962 went into pop music orbit with Telstar. "I joined from Hotpot onwards. All the ones I was on didn't do very well," he says, cheerfully.

The North-East connection - for there usually is one - is that he now lives in Whitby, helps take the money (as an earlier column had supposed) at the lighthouse on the end of the pier and after a 30-year break is again singing for his supper.

As last week's Gadfly reported, it was Whitby's celebrated Victorian photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe who drew him to the North Yorkshire coast.

A friend in Southend had paid £10 for a Sutcliffe photograph of Polly Swallow, a Whitby donkey keeper's daughter. "I was immediately mesmerised by the whole thing, offered him £40 for the photograph and the next day wrote Polly Swallow, the title track on my 1997 album."

He spent three "brilliant" years with the Tornados, Billy Fury's backing group, before becoming a wholesale egg and potato merchant and then opening a small supermarket. "The intention was to retire on the proceeds, but in 1995 they opened a Sainsbury's at the end of the road and you can probably guess the rest."

Seeking images of Sutcliffe in Whitby, he met Jenny Matthews, a Lancastrian who'd seen the pictures and also wondered what Whitby was like. They met in the White Horse and Griffin and are now partners.

He does gigs around Whitby and Scarborough, plays the holiday camps, has been (he says) as far as Cleckheaton.

The wonders of Whitby are what he has to come back for, though, the lighthouse man shown the way home.

IN serious danger of becoming the column's modern music correspondent, Kevin O'Beirne in Washington points out another Whitby connection in Glen Matlock's autobiography "I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol".

The Sex Pistols, it may be recalled, were a particularly notorious punk band, though it was before they'd reached infamy's zenith - nadir, possibly - that they played Whitby Workmen's Club and were paid off after a couple of numbers.

"The music's all right," the committee man explained, "but the bingo players next door can't hear the numbers being called."

LAST Saturday's Guardian ran a peevish column on correct geographical locations. "Hull is plainly on Humberside just as Middlesbrough is on Wearside and Newcastle on Tyneside and will for ever remain so, whatever the Municipal Year Book may say." The Municipal Year Book, it is to be hoped, intends to say rather differently.

WE all make mistakes - how often has a Gadfly note thus begun? - which is what compels Ian Forsyth to underline the misspelling of tournedos, as in tournedos Rossini, throughout last week's column.

Though he claims to be unable to recognise a tournedos steak if it bit him on the bum - "that WOULD be role reversal" - Ian recalls a 1960s commercial for Blue Nun, aimed at those who knew nothing about wine.

"It was in the form of a strip cartoon in which a suit-clad gent was trying to find a wine to go with the disparate meals chosen by his guests."

The line was "There's JB with his tournedos Rossini." The wine was Blue Nun, of course.

Blue Nun still sells five million bottles a year though in some places is regarded as passe, a French term approximately meaning naff.

Nor, however understandably, should Blue Nun be confused with The Singing Nun, born Jeanine Deckers, who in 1963 had a number one hit with Dominique and remains (not altogether surprisingly, the Americans never having been over fond of the Smurfs) the only Belgian to top the charts in the US. Remember it...?

Dominque, oh Dominque

Over the land he plods along,

Never looking for reward

He just magnifies the Lord,

He just magnifies the Lord,

He just magnifies the Lord.

The Singing Nun retired to the convent in 1965 but left the following year, further enraging those left behind by recording a song praising God for allowing the contraceptive bill to be invented.

She was involved in a double suicide pact in the 1980s, amid allegations of sex and drugs, if not necessarily rock and roll.

THE column a couple of weeks back noted a national newspaper survey which put the wealth of government Chief Whip and NW Durham MP Hilary Armstrong at £675,000 - and former Darlington MP Michael Fallon's riches at a very much more stratospheric level.

Hilary has subsequently pleaded poverty, relatively at any rate, though unfortunately it was an answering machine message.

"I assume nobody, but nobody, will take it seriously," she says and hopes particularly that her bank manager will think it funny - "otherwise he'll be wondering why I haven't paid off my overdraft".

Splendid soul that she is, the Crook-based MP has offered to use her last few bob to get the drinks in, regardless.

ERNEST Armstrong, Hilary's father, was NW Durham MP before her and also a formidable Northern League centre half - the term "formidable" may be considered almost euphemistic - for Stanley United.

Up on that football-daft hill top, Ernest was nicknamed Sikey, or possibly Psychie, but by either spelling entirely affectionately.

We recalled it last Saturday evening over a half with long serving Crook councillor Bob Pendlebury. Bob remembered canvassing in Spennymoor for the senior Armstrong in Ernest's first general election; Spennymoor also had a Northern League side.

"Weez the new feller, then?" someone asked him.

"One of the Armstrongs from Stanley Hill Top," said Bob.

"Not that dirty beggar Sikey that plays centre half?" demanded his aghast inquisitor.

"Oh no," said honest Bob, "no relation whatever."

...and finally, infant school children in the Borough of Darlington have all been given copies of the "Good food gang's" autumn and winter menu.

So far, so grammatically impeccable.

The menu goes on, alas, to talk of potatoe, tomatoe and rasberry, to ignore the apostrophe in shepherds pie and, egregiously, to use the word "an" before consonants.

For some it may be classwork. Washington Post readers might substitute crasswork - "education as practised in the Borough of Darlington".

The column returns in a fortnight.

Published: 22/10/2003