LIKE his egg, which proverbially was good only in parts, the curate's life may also have offered mixed blessings. The egg was immortalised - if not necessarily well preserved - by an 1895 Punch cartoon. A bishop, having served the young cleric an egg which had seen very much better days, asked him how he found it.

The anxious curate replied that parts of it were excellent.

Once the term applied to almost any clergyman, now a curate is generally an assistant to a Church of England parish priest. Traditionally they have been put upon. We recall an exhausted young curate in Shildon who, perhaps uniquely, overslept for Evensong and had to be knocked up by the churchwardens.

It's echoed in a splendid article in this week's Church Times by the Rev David Bryant, Vicar of Boosbeck with Moorsholm in East Cleveland from 1985-90, of Sowerby near Thirsk from 1990-95, and before his retirement in the area around Lastingham, near Pickering.

Mr Bryant's own curacies, served - it should be stressed - in the "civilised" south - were hardly congenial. "The workload was relentless," he writes. "Every day began with Holy Communion at 7am and ended with closing the youth club at 10pm. Time spent with one's family was limited to the weekly day off."

Among his chores was humping a five gallon tank of paraffin each Monday, three-quarters of a mile on the crossbar of his sit-up-and-beg bike.

Mr Bryant was lucky, nonetheless. A long- gone parson in Devon is said early one Sunday to have plied his curate with drink, strung him up in a sack from a beam in a nearby barn and then publicly rebuked him for failing to turn up for the service.

The Bishop of Derry chose candidates for preferment by having them race along the beach; another wretched curate was shackled by chains to the altar and reading desk during the service.

Even Charlotte Bronte thought little of the poor chaps. "I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex," she wrote.

The most oppressed curate in modern ecclesiastical history may have been the Rev Geoffrey Clarkson, whose many responsibilities at St John's in Shildon in the mid-60s included supervision of the youth club in which we Beatle-coiffed buffoons thought ourselves not just God's gift to adolescence, but to Christendom in general.

Geoff subsequently became chaplain of the now infamous Borstal at Feltham, in Middlesex. Compared to St John's youth club, it was probably a doddle.

THE collective noun for curates could be a cassock, or possibly a cowering. The Church of England ordained its latest luminaries at St Petertide - two Sundays ago.

Among many other parishes, the new men and women will serve at Cockerton, Barnard Castle, Holy Trinity in Ripon, Northallerton, Whitby and St Peter's, Redcar.

In a spirit of fraternity, therefore, we should perhaps remind them of the Rev Paul Walker's first sermon as a curate at St Mary's, Barnard Castle, text taken from Matthew 3:7 - "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

It was also his entire sermon. After that he sat down. A few years later, Paul - now Vicar of Norton, Stockton - was named Preacher of the Year by The Times.

BY way of congratulation, Saturday's Daily Telegraph named in a leader the 42 MPs brave enough to vote against a damn great pay rise for themselves. Here is the North-East list:

Chris Mullin (Sunderland South).

WHILST clearly no laughing matter, the foot-and-mouth crisis has still - happily - had its lighter moments.

Pig farmer Clive Sledger from Aldbrough St John, near Richmond, was visited last week by a Ministry vet who was Austrian. "What," asked the vet, "about the vermin?" Clive said that they put down rat poison.

"No, not the vermin, the verming," said the vet, and Clive assured him that they had no problems with worms, either.

Up in Tow Law, meanwhile, David Craggs - local baker and good egg - belatedly joined the protest march against the stink from the incinerator site.

Friends asked what he was doing there. "Oh," said David, innocently, "I just popped out for a breath of fresh air."

MARTIN Birtle sends a form from Stockton Borough Council headed "Confirmation of Personal Pension Contributions Paid For Parent or Spouce of the Student." Spouce? Spouce? It is - of course - from the education department.

LAST week's musings on acronyms, knackronyms and anagrams elicited a limited and slightly naughty response.

Tom Purvis, for example, won't entirely be surprised to learn that we feel unable to include his anagram of Monica Lewinsky, though readers may care to work it out for themselves.

More salubriously, Alan Archbold in Boldon points out that Clint Eastwood unravels quite nicely into "old West action."

Alan also suggests that Poet's Day - Friday - has become a nationally accepted acronym; Ian Forsyth in Durham adds to yuppie and dinky (Dual Income, No Kids Yet) the rather neat acronym Lombard - Lots of Money But a Real Dickhead.

Not for the first time, however, we are particularly grateful to Kevin O'Beirne from Sunderland whose acronyms range from the Swedish pop group ABBA - from the first initial of all four first names - through scuba (Self-contained Underwater Breathing Equipment) to Pom, as in whinging Pom.

A Pommy was originally an English immigrant to Australia, as likely as not doing penal servitude. Pom, suggests Kevin, is a slight corruption of Prisoner of Mother England or, possibly, Prisoner of Her Majesty.

Chambers Dictionary will have none of it, however, insists that the etymology is "obscure" but that it may be from pomegranate - "alluding to the colour of the immigrants' cheeks".

Whatever its origins, and D H Lawrence favoured the "pomegranate" theory, we shall be hearing a lot more of the querulous classes - until the pips squeak, perhaps - before the summer is much older.

KEVIN O'Beirne also swears that as a child in the West Midlands he lived near the Odtaa Garage. Nothing but trouble, it was said, it was an acronym for One Damn Thing After Another.

Another damn thing, the garage has now made way for a housing development - but to the locals, the area around it will always be the Odtaa.

....and finally, Allen Nixon reports even greater alarm than usual on a visit to his dentist in Stokesley last week - the locum, they announced, was a Mr Michael Amos.

"Blimey, you're everywhere," says Allen - and we shall be back, not bad in parts, next Wednesday.

Published: 11/07/2001