THERE'S been a gas leak in our street this week. It's made sensational viewing and, having interviewed numerous shell-shocked eye-witnesses, I can now reveal how the drama unfolded.

First, some men turned up and created a tiny pile of soil by digging a small hole in the pavement. They fixed the leak and went away.

A few hours later, some more men arrived with some large barricading for the small hole and the tiny pile. They blocked the path and nearly half the road with their barricading, and then went away.

Quiet descended on our little terrace - as did the rain which washed most of the tiny pile down the drain - until, a couple of days later, some more men turned up. In fact, it may have been two different lots of men who turned up almost simultaneously but eye-witnesses were either too traumatised to recall every horrific detail or too overwhelmed by the sudden blur of activity to take it all in.

Anyway, one lot of men removed the remains of the tiny pile and the other lot filled in the small hole, capping it with concrete. They re-positioned the barricades so they now blocked the path and more than half the road. Then they all went away.

The weekend came and went in a throb of lawnmowers and a waft of barbecue smoke, before the denouement of the great gas leak drama. More men turned up - different to all who had been before as they were reported asking for directions. They tore down the barricades, put them in their pick-up, and went away.

The action finally over, people dragged themselves from their doorsteps for the first time in days and returned inside to watch the television. We shall never see such a soap opera on our street in our lifetime.

USELESS trivia of the week: the Queen is negotiating to keep her one Royal Train for two more years (cost to taxpayer: £52 per Royal mile travelled) but her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria had no fewer than 16 Royal Trains. Apparently, Victoria was so afraid of nasty, dirty coaldust getting in her eyes that she insisted that all the coal on board her Royal Trains was white-washed.

HISTORY had thought that Admiral Nelson had been driven into the arms of his voluptuous lover Lady Hamilton by the coldness of his wife Fanny. But letters found at Morpeth this week will re-write history.

Nelson and Fanny married in 1787. He became a hero in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile. Then he began his affair. Fanny didn't realise for years. In her letters, she praised Lady Hamilton's kindness. She even nursed her through an illness - an illness that Fanny didn't know was morning sickness as Lady Hamilton was carrying Nelson's child.

Fanny's letters show that around 1801 she got an inkling that "some mischief is brewing". She confronted him, and was cruelly rejected. For four years, she implored Nelson to take her back. Her final letter was returned marked: "Opened by Lord Nelson but not read".

Nelson died at Trafalgar in 1805, leaving his fortune to Lady Hamilton. She gambled it away, was imprisoned for bankruptcy in 1813 but fled to France where she died an alcoholic.

It all makes Stephen Byers look the very model of morality.