FOR reasons chiefly though not entirely associated with cowardice, it was 38 years before last Friday since we'd darkened the door of the dentist.

The last time was the school clinic in Bishop on what used to be called gas morning, a bitter-sweet legacy of too many Toffee Crisps and of a truculent teenager's teething troubles.

Lesson indelibly learned, those teeth which remained have been rather better looked after. North and south, they would still be set fair but for the lovely old gateman at Norton and Stockton Ancients Football Club.

The bag from which he offered a sweet could have been in his pocket since the Ancients were themselves bits of bairns, the sort in which black bullets were twopence a quarter.

These were stickier, could have been mass produced in a glue works or used to fix wayward wallpaper, and might have been twopence a stone. The sweet wrapped itself around the smallest of the bottom teeth like a python around a pet mouse. The tooth - the whole tooth - broke in half. For two nights, it hurt like hell.

Emergency appointments are difficult at the best of times, nearly impossible for unregistered NHS patients. The horse dentist visiting the village the same morning almost had an unexpected customer.

Finally, a Darlington dentist who'd better be nameless - but who's the pot model of his late and lamented father - showed compassion.

The guy was utterly excellent. His premises were comfortable and user friendly, his staff courteous and comforting, his attention almost immediate.

The only problem was that in the surgery itself they played local radio and local radio in these parts - as we have bemoaned for several years - ineffably and inescapably means commercials for Frank's Factory Flooring.

Just as the dentist promised, removing the mangled molar hardly hurt at all. The moment the job was done, however, some vacuous loon with several hundred carpet tiles loose was once more bellowing "I love carpets, me".

At that moment, the pain in the dentist's surgery was excruciating. Can't they pull those bloody commercials, an' all?

IN the company of several broadcasting people - Alan Powell, just retired from the BBC, Tyne Tees weatherman Bob Johnson with barely a cloud on his horizon, ambling Andy Kluz and his dog Daisy - we set out the following morning for a hike up Teesdale.

There were ten of us, all male, and the sort of thing about which men talk on such occasions is the front page story in The Times last week headed "Your health now in your own hands." Those who missed it will have to use their imagination.

Over a couple outside the High Force Hotel, the conversation turned towards advertising and was thus lurched in the direction of the gentleman's factory flooring.

A fellow hiker knew someone who'd been in on the original idea. Rug from under the feet? "He thought it was awful, too."

RECALLING the seven mile walk up from Willington to Tow Law, last week's column confessed to "going A over T" against a kerb on Stanley hill top. It caused some initial confusion in Tow Law Workmen's - until a translator with a teaching certificate arrived, no one knew what A over T meant.

British Slang by Roy Puxley acknowledges that the A is constant but that the T can stand for either "tip" or "tit". It means "to fall, though not necessarily head over heels as the term implies."

A-grade as always, Tow Law can work out the rest for itself.

CITING Flopsy Bunny, or Beatrix Potter at least, last week's column supposed that lettuce was soporific. Having slept on it, we believe the claim to be true. The early Romans ate lettuce at the end of meals both to improve digestion and to induce a good eight hours shuteye.

In Book XX (honest) of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder proclaims: "Lettuce has special properties. They are soporific and can check sexual appetite, cool a feverish body, purge the stomach and increase the volume of blood."

Like most folk, Gadfly gets through several beds of lettuce in these salad days. In one respect, happily, the elder Pliny appears to have been mistaken.

THE Stokesley Stockbroker, meanwhile, tells of an elderly lady in those parts who, acknowledging the need to move with the technological times, pointed to the salad section in the greengrocer's and said "I'll have one of those worldwide Webb's..."

...and finally, a toast - 90 today - to Billy Cottle, one of the most outrageously colourful licensees it has ever been our great good fortune to encounter.

"Most people reckon he's been long dead, but he's still going along quite nicely," says his friend Jim Smith. Happily, adds Jim, he's also little changed.

Billy was camp when camp was a row of pink tents. He had the Dun Cow in his native Willington, made a spectacular production of the Colliery Inn at High Jobs Hill, above Crook and came out of retirement to run the Red Lion at North Bitchburn.

The Dun Cow was subsequently renamed Cottles, still is, though the old lad apparently wasn't very happy about it.

At 15 he'd left the pit and gone off to London, slept on a bench in Hyde Park and was awoken by one of the well meaning ladies who in those days looked out for the destitute. She gave him a card to take to a hotel kitchen where he was given both food and a job.

Thereafter he worked at the Grosvenor and the Dorchester, was valet to the musician Larry Adler, had spells in the RAF and the merchant navy but returned happily to Willington.

A man for whom the term "character" appears altogether inadequate, he was also a member - Independent, then Labour - of the old Crook and Willington Urban Council. Enjoy the nervous nineties, old friend.