TWO of us, old friends, met up in London last Friday. Little Steve had travelled first class two days earlier, making the 317-mile round trip on the Virgin-operated West Coast Main Line from Crewe.

Booked three weeks in advance, his ticket included as much gin and tonic as reasonably he could consume - Sir Richard may have made a mistake there - and an appealing selection of tapas.

It cost £27, return, the lot.

We'd left Darlington on the East Coast Main Line at 6.30 on Friday morning - hardly peak period - travelling "standard" class and also booked three weeks in advance. The train was barely a tenth full leaving Darlington, not two thirds occupied into Kings Cross.

The homeward seat, on the 3.30pm, was reserved in something called Standard Plus, the Plus factor that there was complimentary tea or coffee (no gin and tonic) and little packets of biscuits.

Since Standard Plus passengers must on no account assume delusions of grandeur and imagine themselves first class citizens, the drinks come in mugs - not cups - and with a poxy plastic stirrer. No spoon feeding on GNER.

The cost of that piffling, bog standard perquisite? A return ticket for £142.

Gadfly's admiration for GNER is long on record. They have operated a good service under difficult conditions but now hang by corporate fingertips onto the franchise.

It may not just be Little Steve whom Sir Richard is seducing with his buckshee gin and tonic.

DARLINGTON railway station travel centre (formerly booking office) has acquired a new and seriously dazzling fitted carpet, the stripey sort of thing that requires dark glasses from 50 yards. "It's horrible, not the one we ordered at all. Someone's made a terrible mistake," confides a ticket clerk. You've heard of the wrong sort of snow and the wrong sort of leaves... just wait till you see the travel centre carpet.

EVER literary, last week's column noted that a new Barratt housing development at Colburn, near Catterick Garrison, had roads named after Rudyard Kipling, James Herriot, Catherine Cookson, assorted Brontes and someone called Austin.

Jane Austen, perhaps?

Forever charitable, however, Gill Wootten in Darlington wonders if they meant Alfred Austin, instead. Born in 1835, Austin became Poet Laureate in 1896. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature records that he published 20 volumes "of little merit" and an "unfortunate" ode in celebration of "The Jamieson Raid".

The ironic thing is that the doggerel most frequently attributed to Austin, marking the illness of the then Prince of Wales, may not have been written by him at all.

Across the wires the electric message came

He is not better, he is much the same.

Clearly they don't write them like that any more, not even in canny old Colburn.

APPOINTED in 1999, the present Poet Laureate is Andrew Motion, professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. "His exposition is as vacuous as his poetry is verbose," observed the Daily Telegraph.

Mo Mowlam, then Redcar's MP, had proposed Sir Paul McCartney for the royal role, a suggestion sneeringly described by The Times as "hilarious" - but have we ever had a Laureate worth the wreath?

STILL with poetry in motion, and for that matter still in East Anglia, last week's reference to the Singing Coach Driver - as overheard at the Hotel de Paris in Cromer - brought back happy memories to Peter Crawforth, in Consett.

Peter's a coach driver, too, encountered his fellow traveller on a New Year tour to Great Yarmouth three years ago, recalls both that his waistcoats made John Virgo look conservative in comparison and that his passengers were very impressed.

What, though, of The Singing Nun and of Norfolk's other wandering minstrel, The Singing Postman?

The nun, otherwise the Belgian born Jeanine Deckers, was a one hit wonder in 1961 with a song called Dominique, an instant theme tune for Nicky Sharkey, Sunderland's centre forward at the time.

She left the order in 1965, lived in poverty and in an unholy alliance with another nun and in 1985 died in a suicide pact with her girl friend, each clutching a crucifix.

The postman, alias Allan Smethurst, was born in 1927 in Sheringham, a few miles up the coast from Cromer, bought a guitar from Woolies and had an even more unlikely hit in 1966 with Hev Yew Got a Loight Boy.

He was mobbed by fans outside Stowmarket Co-op, appeared on Joe and Co - the successor to Crackerjack - and on the same Top of the Pops bill as the Stones.

Sadly, follow-ups like I Miss My Little Miss from Diss and Fertilising Lisa failed to strike the same note, and there was also an unfortunate court case involving his mother, stepfather and a chip pan.

Though Hev Yew Got a Loight Boy was rekindled in an Ovaltine commercial in 1994, the alcoholic Smethurst had long lived in poverty in the Salvation Army hostel in Grimsby, the Ivor Novello award for the best novelty song of 1966 still by his bed. He died last Christmas - a beneficiary, said The Times obituary, of the British public's enduring sympathy for the underdog.

THE enduring affection for the underdog may also explain the column's ever-overflowing diary. B-list celebrity, we are opening Butterknowle church fair on the afternoon of November 17 and, C-list, speaking for the fourth time at Cockerton Cricket Club's dinner that evening. If anyone in Daddry Shield, Danby or Dringhouses is looking down the D-list, they'd best make it before lunch.

FOOLISHLY tinkering with the boundaries, we noted on August 29 that "Cleveland" - first mentioned in the 11th Century - lay entirely south of the Tees.

Not so, says John Wiggins in Skelton Green - near Saltburn - who encloses as evidence a map of England and Wales in 1086, pinched from an old Intermediate History Atlas for Schools.

Cleveland, meaning "the hilly district", included Darlington to the west, stretched northwards towards Aycliffe, all but embraced Northallerton and ended to the north of Whitby.

Officially, nine hundred years later, it doesn't exist at all.

....and finally, the 5s and 3s on Monday night took us to the Rise Carr, a working lads' boozer in the former heavy engineering district of Darlington, and into the combative company of Mr Mark Lambton, 39.

Mark's a Rise Carr lad and very proud of it - street fighter, hard drinker, true Brit and vehemently anti-racist.

Whatever he's done has always been confined to his own parish, until last Thursday evening when he watched Question Time and for the first time in his life telephoned the BBC to complain.

"The way they were bulling up Islam was absolutely disgusting" he said - and by every other account, he was right.