FOR the first time since they banned Beech Nut chewing gum from the back room of the Red Lion in Shildon in 1966, the column found itself on Saturday night in an establishment where notices warned against "illegal substances".

Illegal substances should not be confused with carlins (q.v), which remain legal, but lethal.

This was Newcastle, the Black Swan Arts Centre in Westgate Road, the launch of a CD called Honesty Boxes by Jez Lowe (pictured below) and the Bad Pennies - more of which in Thursday's John North.

Jez, internationally acclaimed, is from Grants Houses, an unprepossessing hamlet between Easington and Horden where men are men and women make their excuses - which may help explain why his worldwide newsletter is called Midnight Mail.

"Midnight mail" is the most magnificent euphemism, linked to what Jez's American agent Andy Smyser calls outhouses - as in brick, as in gales.

The term relates to the unenvied gentlemen employed to empty ash closets - there will be Gadfly readers, alas, who will needs ask a grandparent what an ash closet was - after luckier folk had gone to bed. Cometh the hour, cometh the midnight mailman.

"It doesn't mean that the newsletter is full of ****," said the engaging Andy, a former US lawyer.

Nor does it, but the night shifters may arouse poignant memories, nonetheless. What did you call yours?

THE only time we've been to Grants Houses was in 1987, to chat to a West Indian international cricketer and Viv Richards lookalike called Derick Parry, for several summer seasons Horden's highly popular professional.

Since it was June, as John Wesley almost observed of Weardale 200 years earlier, it was enough to freeze the bails off a 28 inch stump.

Derick's fire blazed half way up the chimney, a box of Kleenex sniffed on the chair arm, curtains were draped at seven o'clock in a lugubrious attempt to exclude rain-soaked reality.

He wore two sweaters and long johns beneath his tracksuit. Even his conked out computer had caught a cold in sympathy.

Whether the midnight mailmen still did their rounds at Grants Houses is not possible to recall, but as a masterpiece of misery Derick Parry, June 5, 1987, evokes many memories.

ON the subject of midnight cowboys, the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Euphemisms is as reluctant to get its hands dirty as might be expected from a book on down to earth matters that's named after a posh area of London.

Nor are the sundry glossaries in Scott Dobson's celebrated manuals much more help, though Histry o' the Geordies translates the appropriate Macbeth couplet "Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air" into "Thors an aaful stife in heor."

Bloomsbury talks of "winsome circumlocutions" and "lexical minefields" but also acknowledges the term "night soil", the phrase most popular among rural district council sanitary inspectors.

Night soil, it says, was an 18th and 19th Century term - really? - for "human faeces collected for use as fertiliser".

The verb is still alive and well, it adds, in "excrementitious contexts".

In America, apparently, there were also honey buckets and honey carts, an originally military use which may be considered ironic and then considered no more.

Andy Smyser's Kentucky grandfather had an outhouse, too, until the gale pretty contemptuously blew it down. Rather than go with the flow, as it were, he used the woods instead.

"It was minus thirty degrees out there," says Andy, a lady who properly idolised her granddad.

THE column's favourite privy counsellor is Dulcie Lewis from Carperby, in Wensleydale, whose book on the subject - Down the Yorkshire Pan - left little to the genteel imagination.

In the dales, she reckons, it was usually The Farmers' Weekly which was pressed into square-cut service; in Co Durham, regrettably, it was probably The Northern Echo.

In Wensleydale they also had coconut matting on the floor, but that was for no other purpose than to keep the feet warm.

There were two holers and multiples thereof, and quite often there were mischievously placed nettles - as in the teachers' netty in West Witton school during the 1940s.

In country areas, says Dulcie, they'd put the residue on the rhubarb. In Shildon, we still preferred custard.

BACK to carlins, the annual feast just passed. Does anyone still fire them through pluffers, asks Charlie Westberg in Darlington?

Charlie grew up getting on 80 years ago in Hendon, Sunderland. Though a pluffer sounds awfully like a pea shooter - in the post-innocent age does anyone, other than in the Bash Street Kids, still carry THOSE? - he insists that the specification was different.

"We'd try to hide them down our socks, but they always seemed to end up in the teacher's desk," says Charlie.

It was a pretty philistine activity, anyway. Soaked in rum, butter and vinegar, carlins are an awful lot nicer than fired at unsuspecting pedagogues through a pluffer.

STILL at school, Janet McCrickard writes affectionately of First Aid in English - "a blue-backed, heavy, Reader's Digest sized book" - that was more plasma than sticking plaster in proper post-war primaries.

Janet particularly remembers the section on nonsense rhymes, which recent columns have celebrated:

The elephant is a bonny bird

It flits from bough to bough,

It makes its nest up a rhubarb tree

And whistles like a cow.

In later editions, however, the nonsense became neutered and the chapter prefaced by some caffy-hearted caveat from an educational psychologist.

Janet herself became a teacher - biology, memory suggests - but would love again to have a copy of First Aid in English.

Does anyone still keep one at the back of such educationally incorrect store cupboard? Still better, does anyone have two?

SINCE recent columns have had a marked Geordie or Cockney twang, a hint of Scouse from Steve Wilson - exiled to Darlington from Tranmere Rovers.

"In Birkenhead and Liverpool," says Steve, "it's a lolly-ice. Here and everywhere else I've been in Great Britain it's an ice lolly.

"Why? And is there anywhere else in this country, or the world for that matter, where it's called a lolly-ice?"

...and finally, back to last Saturday night in Newcastle and to euphemisms. The last train to Durham, Darlington and Middlesbrough starts from the Central Station at 10pm; the announcer said that it was delayed, awaiting the arrival of train crew.

Regular users know that "delayed" is a railway term meaning "going nowhere" and, inevitably, it proved.

The motley crew having failed to turn up at all, the replacement bus left, querulously, at 10.50pm, calling at all stations. "At least it'll give you something for your column," someone said.

"No it won't, railway chaos isn't news any more," said her friend, and was probably nearer the truth. It was midnight, appropriately, before we hit Darlington.

Whatever the hour, whatever the accent, we do the business again next week.

Published: Wednesday, March 20, 2002