SPECTATOR'S pleased to report the burying of the hatchet in a dispute with a knight of the realm.

The dispute - or perhaps it was rather more a grudge on Spectator's part - goes back six years to the momentous week when news appeared on the front page of this newspaper, displacing the property advertsiements.

It wasn't actually the first time (it had made it there for an special election edition at the time of William Hague's first parliamentary victory in Richmond in 1989) but it was the herald of a substantial modernisation of the paper.

At that time, a newspaper which didn't have news on its front page was newsworthy in itself and the radical change attracted plenty of media interest.

BBC Look North was among the TV crews who turned up at our printing plant to record the first copies of the new-look paper coming off the presses. The BBC reporter also, quite reasonably, sought reaction to the change from the paper's readers and interviewed Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, one-time MP for Stockton South.

Mr Wrigglesworth, as he then was, proceeded to roundly condemn the change, suggesting that it was the end of civilisation as he knew it. The report was duly screened in the evening regional news bulletin, much to Spectator's irritation.

Sir Ian left the area not long afterwards to become a big noise in property development on Tyneside and it wasn't until recently that Spectator came across him at the Wise Speke centenary celebrations (see page 13).

Buttonholed about the issue, Sir Ian had clearly forgotten what he had said at the time (it was a long time ago, granted) but he quickly heaped fulsome and extravagant praise on the "dear old D&S".

We parted company on good terms but the moral of the story is that newspapermen have long memories - and once a politician always a politician.

All hands on deck ...

IT was a scene straight out of one of those Seventies comedy sketch shows.

A friend of Spectator had taken her teenage son down to Northallerton rail station to buy a railcard.

Armed with gangly youth, suitably dubious mug shot photo and cash, she presented the nice chap behind the counter with the gubbins, only to be told :"Er, could you hang on just a minute? I've got to see a train off."

He smiled, disappeared out of the office, pulled on a fluorescent jacket and raced off to the southbound platform, where he was spotted duly waving off a GNER train.

He came back, slightly out of breath, apologised for keeping everyone waiting and said he had to go and see another train on its way, this time heading north.

Would-be passengers were left to marvel at the man's many talents, or maybe at a staff roster that had left just one person in charge of, well, everything.

The disgruntled teenage member of the waiting party was heard to mutter: "By the time he gets here I'll need a senior citizen's railcard."