Elvis, not The King, but a saint

Still more significantly, perhaps, we found ourselves staying in the parish of St Elvis.

Whilst Presley may have been deified by a generation, and had a 1965 number one with Crying in the Chapel, few others will realise that St Elvis existed 1400 years before him.

The area east of St David's, in Pembrokeshire, is not only the parish of St Elvis, once with its own rights and rectors, but also has St Elvis's farm, St Elvis's rock (of all things) and a picture of a latter day Elvis impersonator on the mantlepiece of the Cambrian Arms in Solva.

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints doesn't acknowledge him, though he is the same (apparently) as Saints Ailbhe and Eilwn - an Irish bishop renowned for a certain sybaritism and for being suckled by a she-wolf.

Many years later, when the old wolf was being hunted down, old Elvis returned the protection.

Nearby there's also a village named after St Florence. The Welsh, somewhat irreverently, know it simply as Flo.

WHILST he might deny sainthood, Gadfly's colleague Harry Mead is clearly a good bloke - who else would not only offer a few welcome paragraphs upon our return but suggest that after a week out of the country it might spark a cold start?

Earlier columns had talked of Sydney Smith, the 19th century essayist and clergyman who suggested that his idea of heaven would be pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

Smith, says Harry, was rector of Foston, near York, for 20 years from 1809 though he never really took to the country - "a sort of healthy grave," he wrote.

Writing to Lady Georgina Morpeth, wife of the heir to Castle Howard - "I told you there were local connections," says Harry - Smith also offered 20 suggestions for lifting her bout of depression. Space and shame allow us to reproduce but half:

l Live as well and drink as much wine as you dare.

l Go into a shower bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.

l Take short views of human life, not further than dinner or tea.

l Attend to the effects coffee and tea produce upon you.

l See as much as you can of those friends and acquaintances who respect and like you.

l Compare your lot with that of other people.

l Don't expect too much of human life, a sorry business at best.

l Be as much as you can in the open air, without fatigue.

l Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.

l Keep good blazing fires.

Smith also sent her ladyship gifts, including a basket of potatoes - "in case," he wrote sagely, "your happiness depends upon potatoes as much as does mine."

HEAVEN in ordinary, the correspondent who prefers to be known as That Bloody Woman recalls - but can't attribute - the quotation: "When the angels play for God they play Bach; when they play for themselves they play Mozart."

"Personally," she adds, "if Gabriel can't play baroque trumpet concertos, I ain't going."

ANOTHER correspondent, That Bloody Man, notes that the annual Plain English awards have blown a raspberry at Halifax General Insurance Services.

"I can confirm," wrote a manager, "that you have not inform us a conservatory that has never been built and that you have not been charged any extra for one built."

It is not known, adds the citation, what was meant.

THE Western Mail, "the national newspaper of Wales", brings good news for one of the North-East's better known exiles.

Paul Daniels, son of South Bank and old boy of Sir William Turner's Grammar School in Redcar, has conjured his way back onto the front page.

Daniels, it will be recalled, was believed so greatly to have lost his popular magic that he featured, willingly, in a series of lager ads.

"Buy Heineken," said the punchline, "or we'll keep on running these commercials."

Now, however, the 65-year-old entertainer seems to have done the trick once again. Booked for the Merlin Magic and Mystery festival, he was to have appeared at the Bro Myrddin Bowls Club.

So great is the demand, however - "an amazing, reputation defying feat," says the Western Mail - that he'll now top the bill at the Lyric in Carmarthen instead.

HOLIDAY reading - other than the Western Mail and in the County Echo the biggest story to hit Fishguard since 1797, when Ms Jemima Nicholas's scarlet petticoats sent packing the last invasion of Britain - chiefly comprised Roy Puxley's "uncensored" British Slang dictionary. (Robson Books, £16.95.)

Much of it is a sort of Cockney rhyming slang bang, from an age (happily) where PC meant Dixon of Dock Green.

We can therefore report that an Amos (as in Amos and Andy) is a brandy or, after the breathalyser, a shandy.

Amos and Andy, as very old readers may recall, was an American series popular around the time when everyone bought a 14 inch television in order to watch the coronation.

"It was to political correctness what Vlad the Impaler was to humanitarianism," writes Puxley and if anyone should know good from Vlad, it is he.

FURTHER to the loads of tripe about which recently we have written, an e-mail from Brian Madden in New York City recalls happy nights at the Killinghall Arms in Middleton St George, near Darlington.

Years ago, says Brian, lads returning from town to the Killy would buy tripe and cow heel from the stall outside the Covered Market.

"The tripe would be chopped and put into a large bowl with vinegar and onions for everyone to help themselves from the bar. The cow heels would be covered in vinegar, salt and pepper and eaten like that.

"I can honestly say that I have never eaten either whilst sober, and never bloody will."

THEN there's Marmite, about which the phrase "Love it or hate it" has become a clich thickly spread.

It appeared again in The Times on Saturday, in a four page magazine feature about Teesside born property developer Alex Hutchinson, said to have Newcastle's first £1m pad.

It's part of a former riverside printing works, Grade II listed, said in style to be hard-edged and contemporary. "It's like Marmite, you either love it or hate it," suggested Hutchinson, who lives most of the time in Geneva, anyway.

Marmite, now owned wholly by Bovril, was introduced to Britain in 1902 and has changed little - except to provoke such stock reactions.

A taste test therefore: free Marmite on toast will be served from 2pm on Friday by the delightful landlady of the Britannia in Darlington. A report, love it or hate it, in next week's column.

To end this one, however, another definition of paradise on earth. Heaven, no matter how joyous the holiday, is again to sleep in your own bed.

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