Blowing a melancholy tune

For 30 years John's been lead singer with Skerne, a folk group based in Trimdon and named after the river which rises nearby.

The song, which more than any other they've sung, is The Trimdon Grange Explosion, written by pitman's poet Tommy Armstrong on the night of the horror which killed 74 miners in 1882.

They'd also sung it at the Trimdon Folk Festival the weekend after the New York terror. An American industrialist in the audience afterwards offered to finance a special recording for the appeal.

"The similarities between the two incidents are quite haunting," says John. "There are songs you can sing and be thinking about papering the hall at the same time, but I'd really been conscious of the words that night..."

Men and boys set out that morning for to earn their daily bread,

Never thinking that by evening, they'd be numbered with the dead.

The CD was recorded within a week, launched by John Prescott at the Labour Party Conference - "there was a pin drop silence," says Ian Luck, helping promote it - and a copy has been sent to President Bush.

"Whether it makes £1,000 or £1m, every penny will go to the appeal fund," says John Burton, who - though a Trimdon lad - had never heard the song until he was 23 and teaching in Hertfordshire.

"It was a folk club in Hoddesdon and I nearly fell off the chair," he recalls. "They didn't have folk clubs up here then."

The CD's star, he insists, is 23-year-old Lynsey Jordan, solo cornet player with the Trimdon Concert Brass Band. Lynsey, playing the cornet since she was nine, performs Gresford - the miners' hymn - on the CD.

"Superb cornet playing, wonderful tone," says John.

"A very moving experience," says Lynsey.

The CD is available for £5, including postage, from the Sedgefield Constituency Labour Party office, Myrobella, Trimdon Colliery, Co Durham TS29 6DU.

JOHN Clark is the North-East's Baron Bountiful, a munificent master at giving away millions of other people's money.

Retired in 1990 after 22 years as Durham University's geography professor - and latterly pro vice-chancellor - he now not only chairs the National Lottery's Regional Community Fund but Awards for All and the Co Durham Foundation Group Committee, both with money not to spurn.

We met in Staindrop, where both of us had been invited to lunch with the Teesdale Association of Day Clubs. "Sir John" they kept calling him - perhaps inadvertently, perhaps because they knew what side their bread was buttered up on. "Or perhaps they know something I don't," said Professor Clark, genially.

Teesdale's day clubs - eight, usually weekly - offer fellowship, expert advice and a proper lunch to the area's elderly and disabled. There's a small part-time staff and 60 volunteers. "We're hedging our bets," said Sandra Moorhouse, the deputy chairman. "We'll probably qualify before long."

Staindrop's club has 24 members, Birmingham exile Bill Keynes the only male - and with his wife Audrey to keep an eye on him. There used to be another feller, they reckoned, but he seemed to have been frightened off. "Can't think why," said Bill.

On Tuesday there was home-made tomato soup, shepherds pie, sherry trifle - £2 the lot - and a glass of wine with which to toast their success.

"We had to have wine if you were coming," said Sandra.

They talked of flu jabs, of the intensity or otherwise of the trifle's relationship with a sherry bottle and of Staindrop's splendid Christmas lights.

A lady called Doris reckoned they'd erected a fairy light bike outside her house - "they said it was a Christmas stocking, but it looked like a bike" - and hoped that this year they might park it elsewhere.

They meet in Scarth Hall, where hangs a knitted village handiwork - Raby Castle, Scarth Hall, post office, village green - completed chiefly by Mary Pattison, 73, and Florence Jackson, ten years her senior.

There's lots of water, too. "You can't get into Staindrop without crossing water," they said.

After lunch Baron Bountiful, nice chap, gave a little address. In six years, he said, the North-East had got lucky with over £100m in community funding from the Lottery. Teesdale, population 28,000, had had £1.3m and the day clubs £61,000,

There were no guarantees, of course, and funding was falling with Lottery sales, but they'd get nothing if they didn't try. Shy bairns, he meant, get no sweets. After that they had an annual meeting, an excuse for us both to bail out. Poor Bill Keynes was photographed at the kitchen sink, but they'd all had a good afternoon.

Carpe diem, as the Romans might almost have said: treasure the day clubs.

LAST week's column noted a somewhat abbreviated conversation with the Rev John Stephenson, former Vicar of Eppleton - Hetton-le-Hole - and for years a regular, radical correspondent to the Hear All Sides column.

For almost a decade, however, he had maintained a vow of silence hereabouts. The reason, he had said before hanging up, was that the Echo "crucified" him in 1990-91. Now he has at last written again - partly to resume hostilities with Margaret Thatcher and her apostles, partly to complain about the photograph we used last week.

"Would you please pass on to the person who chose it my dismay," he asks. "It is the worst I've ever had taken."

John's now retired to East Herrington, Sunderland, and professes himself never fitter nor happier - "having the good fortune to be working alongside a priest who, like myself, has a social conscience." It's to be hoped this photograph suits him better.

THE note on John Stephenson had been sparked by another on retired Darlington chartered surveyor Basil Noble, with whom he also corresponded. Basil's the great champion of Frosterley marble, which (we said) occasionally came from Teesdale. Martin Snape disagrees. "Marble from Teesdale is Eggleston marble and not as black."

Martin has a Frosterley marble fireplace surround in his Victorian house in Durham - "curious, but not particularly handsome to my mind. As Mr Noble suggests, it is all a matter of taste."

FROM Bruce Dodsworth, now in Windermere, a plea for information about the Toadpool Ghost. Toadpool, quaintly named, is in West Auckland. Bruce was at junior school up the road in St Helen's between 1951-54. Some time during that period, the ghost made its first appearance.

Visiting old haunts the other day, Bruce noticed that the house had been demolished. "I'm sure the incident was reported in The Northern Echo and eventually led to them being rehoused. It was a big story in its day, involving exorcism."

A ghost of a chance? Further information much welcomed.

FINALLY, appropriately, to the Expanded Utter Nonsense, published today. It's the eighth edition since Peter Mortimer - poet, writer, critic and hirsute man about Cullercoats - first turned silly in 1977.

"Funnier than Wordsworth," the Evening Chronicle is said to have observed.

This one (Iron Press; £5.95) includes old favourites like Herbert the Trouserless Squid and newcomers like Willy Woanty and Sid Squidge and the Dinosaur, a self-proclaimed epic.

Space merely permits one of Morty's little limericks:

There was a young lady from Felling

Whose tummy just wouldn't stop swelling,

Said the Vicar "You'd better

"Reveal the begetter!"

But the lady from Felling's not telling.

More nonsense when the column returns in a fortnight.