PERHAPS because last week's column dealt in euphemisms for death, of which macabre matter more shortly, Jim Sayers writes from Sunset Strip. It's not his real address - his real address is Spennymoor - but a reference to declining years. Before the sun slips still further towards the horizon, however, Jim wishes to stake his claim to immortality.

In early 1979, photocopy enclosed, Hear All Sides published his letter making a special case pay claim on behalf of the police. "They are the thin blue line between civilisation and the jungle," he wrote.

These days, of course, "thin blue line" is as synonymous with the British polliss as Dock Green was 40 years ago. But was Jim Sayers, as he suggests, the neologist - the person who first coined the phrase uniformly to describe the police force?

The "thin red line", as readers may know, was first used by The Times war correspondent William Howard Russell to describe the besieged British army at Balaclava in 1854 - "a thin red line tipped with steel".

There's also something in the dictionaries of quotations about inside every fat man there's a thin man struggling to get out, but that is both irrelevant and rather personal. Jim has heard "thin blue line" attributed to Rowan Atkinson; others suggest the latter-day comedian Ben Elton was its originator. It is also, as John Briggs in Darlington points out, the title of Cardiff City FC's fanzine.

Mr Briggs - who since it is too late to bounce the column into cheque book journalism, is paid only in ham and pease pudding sandwiches and thus earns an occasional crust - also discovers that the 8th Battalion of the City of London Regiment, comprising London policemen and postal workers and sometimes known as the Post Office Rifles, was nicknamed the thin blue line during the First World War. Since there is no trace of an earlier constabulary connection, and since it's Christmas, we are inclined to reserve Jim his plot on Fickle Fame Highway - and may his days on Sunset Strip be always June 21.

SPEAKING of which, when did you last see a fat polliss? In the good old days at Bishop magistrates court there'd be any amount of bobbies who, when it came to getting heavy, could offer around 18 stones apiece to the task. Whatever happened to the full weight of the law?

A FIXTURE at Scarborough Cricket Festival, Alf Hutchinson from Darlington recalls a conversation between two Yorkshire lads also on their annual outing:

"Has't tha seen owld Bill this yeer?"

"Naw, he'll not be coming."

"What, not at all?"

"Naw, poor owld lad's got his time ower."

The story is among an emollient array of verbal Vaseline submitted in response to last week's request for ways of soothing death's sting.

Brian Madden e-mails from America to recall that when he had the Ball Alley pub in Stanley the old lads talked of dropping off the bark; Charles Durham in Darlington remembers that Army colleagues unfortunate enough to get in the way of a bullet would be said to have coughed their lot; Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland likes the sound of clogs popping; Pat Cariss in Killerby, Richmond, prefers "catching the early bus" - so much more preferable, she says, than "falling out of the tree."

Though "got away" retains a certain comforting quirkiness, Harry Brook in Crook offers the appealing alternative "gathered" - as in "Our so-and-so was gathered last week."

Better late, there may be more of this next week.

WE had also wondered about the phrases "Kick the bucket" and "Go for a Burton", both happily seized upon by Colin Jones in Spennymoor.

"I had nothing better to do on a cold Sunday afternoon," he writes.

"Kick the bucket", as last week's column suggested, seems most likely to be associated with animal slaughter - "buque" was French for the yoke from which newly dead pigs were hung. "Inevitably the pig would struggle during the process and thus would kick the buque."

Gone for a Burton, much used by Second World War air crew, is rather trickier. Several readers suggest a link with Burton ale - an advertising campaign, perhaps - though Colin's flying in an altogether different direction.

During the war, he reckons - and the theory is given wings by Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable - the RAF took over Burton's store in Blackpool.

"When a crew was shot down in operations, their personal effects were sent to Burton's for safe keeping until it was known if they were dead or alive. Thus if someone was shot down, they were said to have gone for a Burton." "Burton", adds Colin, is also Cockney rhyming slang for rent - as in Burton on Trent - but that's something to which we must return another day.

PREGNANT pause? "Carrying all before her" suggests Pat Cariss, and "She's been eating new bread." Nothing to do with a bun in the oven, then?

LAST week's true story about the cancellation through lack of interest of a motivation course in Hartlepool reminded Harry Page in Murton of a residential week for Co Durham head teachers which he attended, 20 years ago, at Beamish Hall.

After lunch one day, he found a group of fellow course members in animated discussion and inquired the cause of the kerfuffle. "They can't make up their minds where to hold the decision-making course," he was told - and in a manner, adds Harry, that left him in no doubt at all that it was true.

The final paragraph of today's column was to have been about Chris Willsden, another on the ham and pease pudding rota, due to undergo spinal surgery this morning at Middlesbrough General hospital.

It advised nurses on ward 47 that if they wanted to get him out of there double quick, they should play Cliff Richard singing Mistletoe and Wine during his recuperation.

Yesterday afternoon, however, he was advised that there wasn't a bed - the second time in two months that the operation has been cancelled at 24 hours notice. "If I had £10,000 I could doubtless have it done on Thursday," he observes. In the meantime, we shall sing him Mistletoe and Wine in the pub instead.