Times are hard and time is tight. Last week we not only turned down a booze up in a brewery but money, good money, an' all.

The booze up - a beer tasting, properly to identify it - was at Black Sheep in Masham. The money, enough not only to have paid the licence fee but to have put a tub of tulips atop the telly, was on offer from the BBC.

BBC Online had conducted an Internet poll to decide which of the 12 British cities soliciting the European City of Culture 2008 nomination was most favoured.

Newcastle/Gateshead won with 17.5 per cent of the 12,500 votes, Liverpool was second and Oxford third. Pointed this way by the Newcastle newsroom, the BBC wanted a piece in praise of the regional capital.

Ever magnanimous, we suggested a journalist on a rival newspaper instead. His excellent contribution, turned around as quickly as the Shields ferry at knocking off time, revealed that Newcastle has more listed buildings than any city in the country except Bath.

"Newcastle is not just a city, it's an unforgettable experience," he added, and should be forgiven for the soundbite.

Someone on Merseyside had written a similar piece on Liverpool, which kicked off with the arrival in dockland of a bright yellow, 15 foot work of art that's half lamb, half banana and wholly bloody ridiculous.

It's designed - doubtless for a great many yen - by a Japanese called Taro Chiezo who sounds like a particularly silly sausage.

The city with the second most listed buildings in England against something that sounds like it came free with the Knotty Ash issue of the Beano?

Liverpool 0 Newcastle/Gateshead 1.

ANOTHER work of art, sharp-eyed David Thompson from Eaglescliffe sends whence it came this "Collectors' Corner" ad, pictured below, from the Echo on May 13. "A bargain!" adds David, succinctly. (It's a Shildon number, probably explains everything.)

WITHOUT expectation of an echo, last week's column followed the Oban Times in pondering the key in which the region's owls give a hoot.

Save for a letter from Ann Leyburn in Roddymoor, Crook, it fell B flat. Ann, however, recalls an inscription on the Oban Times building:

They came as a boon and a blessing to men

The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley pen.

The admirable Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes it, too, among a cornucopia attributed to that most prolific of authors, Anon.

Used as an Oban Times advertisement, says the Oxford, it was "almost certainly" inspired by an 1890 poem:

It came as a boon and a blessing to men,

The peaceful, the pure, the victorious PEN."

THE Oxford credits Anon with much else, from the Mademoiselle from Armenteers ("hadn't been kissed for 40 years") to the joyous end of term ditty beloved at Bishop Grammar School and far beyond but in our day considered almost irreverent:

No more school, no more stick

No more rotten arithmetic.

No more English, no more French

No more sitting on the hard school bench.....

Perhaps Anon was also responsible for the world's greatest owl joke, the one about what one lovesick owl who turned to his mate in a thunder storm.

Too-wet-to-woo....

WHILST the column's back was turned three weeks ago, canny Scot David Armstrong announced that he is selling Station Taxis in Darlington.

It is the end of an era. We have covered so many miles with them we probably need an MoT.

Now, echoes the word on the airwaves, the operation is to be run by computer and invigilative eyes in the sky.

Instead of the Car 54 Where Are You routine - did they ever find Car 54, incidentally? - the controller will press a couple of keys to discover not just who's closest to a call but who's having a drag behind the town hall.

Another key will allow the driver to announce that he's knocking off for his dinner.

It's possible, goodness knows, that cab rank technology may even be able to teach a machine to replicate the impersonations of the indefatigable Mr Armstrong presently essayed by two-thirds of his drivers.

A computerised cab rank might even have avoided the events of Christmas 1995, when we booked a closing time taxi from the Timothy Hackworth in Shildon.

Unusually for Station, no one appeared. At 11.45pm, we rang to sound a gentle note of concern.

"He's just been on the radio," said the fatuous controller, "his engine's running outside the Timothy Hackworth."

The upshot was that at a quarter to midnight the taxi driver, innocent abroad, was waiting outside the Timothy Hackworth Museum whilst a homesick columnist stood uncertainly outside the Timothy Hackworth pub.

That one was human error, undoubtedly.

IF to err is human and to forgive divine, as Mr Alexander Pope suggested in 1700-and-long-gone, Alice Best from Durham may expect a place among the angels.

Last week's column confessed that, somewhere along the line, an Echo journalist had confused "ancestors" with "descendants".

Alice says we've been doing it for ages - incorrigibly and ineducably - and even names the journalist to whom, several years ago, she complained about the selfsame thing.

He left the Echo in 1996.

LAST Saturday's At Your Service column described an "illicit" Latin Mass, celebrated by traditionalist Catholics in Middlesbrough. Perhaps, suggests John Briggs, it was a load of hokey-cokey.

The familiar party piece, he insists, was a product of Puritan England designed to ridicule the Mass.

In those days, of course, the priest spent most of the service with his back turned against the people. You put your left arm in was probably all they could see until he faced his flock to offer the consecrated bread - "and you turn around."

"Hokey-cokey", adds John - from Darlington - is a corruption of the Latin "Hoc est corpus", meaning "This is my body."

Knees bend, of course, refers to genuflection, "arms stretch" mimics the priest spreading his arms at the moment of consecration. An added advantage, it taught the bairns right foot from left....

And that's what it's all about? "Today in England," says John, "the Roman Catholic Mass is so similar to Holy Communion in the Church of England that sometimes people must wonder which church they're in."

More, as probably they say in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, anon.

Published: 22/05/2002