A GLOOMY note at Easter, but last week we attended two funerals, both for football men.

Billy Bell was 71, carried from St Paul's church at Evenwood to the strains of Matt Monro singing Softly As I Leave You.

John Challoner, just 37, was borne from an overflowing Consett Methodist Church, the music machine played Wonderwall, by Oasis.

Once it was always Abide With Me, at least for football men, now such departures are increasingly common and unarguably effective. None in Sedgefield Parish Church will ever again hear The Girl From Ipanema and not think of Kate Alderson, a bright and beautiful Times journalist killed tragically young in a car crash.

Thoughts of our colleague Ian Weir are stirred not just by the campaign for better cardiac care in the North-East, for which his death was the catalyst, but whenever any of us again hears Dean Martin singing That's Amore.

"When the moon hits the sky, like a big pizza pie, that's Amore..."

Coincidentally while walking the Corpse Way from Keld to Grinton on Good Friday - much more of that twelve and a half mile pilgrimage in Saturday's At Your Service - we asked Tim Tunley, the Vicar of Swaledale, the most improbable last request he'd heard at a funeral.

It was the song about a pub with no beer, said Tim immediately, adding - perhaps unnecessarily - that he thought the poor chap liked a drop.

The column's own death wish is already well known (and may be delayed indefinitely). Whilst familiar tunes are to be applauded - ever acknowledged, anyway - we shall be carried off to a clamorous rendition of Edmond Budry's great hymn Thine Be The Glory, Risen Conquering Son. A note of triumph, after all.

BERT Trussler brought happiness to thousands, a stand-up entertainer usually accompanied on the piano by his dear old pal Charlie Raine and very often performing free.

They were Shildon lads and wherever they played, Bert signed off with the Gracie Fields song Good Night, Good Luck, God Bless You.

When he died about ten years ago, the stowed out congregation at St John's was advised that they hoped for a smiling funeral, a reminder of the fun which Bert so effortlessly engendered.

It worked as well as these things can do until the dismissal. Before he died, there'd been a final recording - Bert tremulously singing Good Night, Good Luck, Charlie tinkling away on the front room piano.

They played it on a tape recorder behind the coffin. At the smiling funeral, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

MENTION in last week's Gadfly of dear old Ivor the Engine proved yet again that the column doesn't know right from left. As Ian Forsyth in Durham points out, Ivor shunted up and down the top left hand corner of Wales and not, as we said, the top right.

The dragon in the Ivor stories was called Idris, incidentally, which gives us chance to observe that it is St George's Day, and to commend its due observance.

LAST week's column also claimed that Knightsbridge was the only London Underground station with six successive consonants in its name, thereby disqualifying Alf Hutchinson's suggestion of Aldwych.

Ian Forsyth sympathises. Aldwych used to be a Tube station, he says, end of a little branch line off the Piccadilly at Covent Garden but open rush hours only.

Phil Atkinson's nomination of Fenchurch Street has also hit the buffers. It's only a station on the national network - and £200 worth on the Monopoly board, of course.

Another reader (as she prefers to be known) reckons the best station names are in The Slow Train by the incomparable Flanders and Swan. More from that song sheet next week.

ON the iron road again, our man in the gold braid cap reports that a conference at the National Railway Museum in York the other day heard plans for a nine day festival in 2004 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of railways in Britain.

Nigel Harris, among the speakers, drew comparison between Promontory, in Utah, and the Stockton and Darlington Railway, closer to home.

Promontory is where, in 1869, the railways from east and west coasts met in the middle, the two final golden spikes hammered in by the respective railroad bosses in the presence of President Ulysses S Grant. "The fanfare was equivalent to the public reaction to the moon landing 100 years later," claims one of the websites.

A shanty town similar to those on the Settle and Carlisle was also established at Promontory, chiefly comprising those two necessities for 19th Century navvies, the knocking shop and the drinking den.

Long neglected, Promontory's claim to global importance was re-established in 1965 when the Golden Spike National Heritage Centre was established. Now there's a visitor centre, working replicas of the two 1869 locomotives and hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Mr Harris, editor of Rail magazine, compared it to the world's first public passenger railway, the Stockton and Darlington. The way it is neglected, he said, is a national disgrace. It is impossible to disagree.

ST George's Day notwithstanding, we feel obliged to report England's defeat at the hands of the Germans last week in the 72nd World Marbles Championships, played at a pub in West Sussex.

Doubtless it is because of the column's recent reveries beneath the marble arches that John Briggs in Darlington sends the sad and rather sordid details: our boys couldn't hold their drink.

"If you put a lot of men in a pub environment and there is beer or marbles, what are they going to choose?" asked championship spokeswoman Julie McCarthy-Fox.

The Saxony Globe Snippers from Germany finally won the shoot-out. They had the distinct advantage of being sober.

SOMEWHAT apprehensively, we sign off with a PS from Ernie Reynolds in Wheatley Hill to recent notes on Barrow Airport, formerly RAF Walney Island.

Ernie, who trained as an Air Gunner there during the war, sends a copy of the Air Gunners magazine in which Walney's joys are recalled by a chap from Norwich.

Ah yes, says Ernie, Norwich...

"Letters from girl friends often had SWALK written on the back, with meant 'sealed with a loving kiss.'

The men used to reply with NORWICH, which (sadly misspelt) meant 'Knickers off ready when I come home'."

Unless shot down in the interim, the column returns next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.htm

Published: ??/??/2003