JIMMY Carter died last week; not the peanut planting president, the other one. Jim was the former landlord of the Coverbridge Inn, a charming and very popular country pub a few miles south of Leyburn in North Yorkshire. Trouble was, he kept overlooking closing time.

Being vague and forgetful was a family failing, Jim told the magistrates after eight warnings and two stiff fines. (Probably he'd forgotten about those, too.)

"He has something which appeals to people in the way that James Herriot appeals to people," added Alan Vickers, his solicitor. It didn't appeal to Leyburn magistrates. Despite more than 100 letters and a petition in his support - the writers included former England footballer and occasional Wensleydale wayfarer Jack Charlton - they not only refused to renew his licence but subsequently transferred it to June, his wife, on condition that Jim moved out.

For nine monastic months, that's how things stayed. Jim became a sort of "My husband next door", forced to spend the night at a neighbour's and forbidden from going behind the bar. A sympathetic visitor even drew a well-remembered cartoon - which long adorned the pub wall - suggesting how Jim might get around the problem. (An open and shut casement, as it were).

Finally, the court was persuaded to let the poor chap sleep in his own bed, an occasion marked (doubtless among other things) by a champagne breakfast.

"It was a bit strange at first but we got used to it," said Jim, but it was also an absurd deprivation for an offence no more contrary to country lore and life than tickling the squire's salmon.

Jim Carter, bless him, had simply used a little bit of licence.

ALL that was 15 years ago, and a lot of water has passed beneath the Coverbridge since then. Still, however, Britain's pub licensing laws remain rooted in Victorian times, or at least in the First World War when they didn't want the cannon fodder falling down before their time came.

Still it's illegal in most pubs (though not in supermarkets) to serve alcohol before 11am or after 11pm, with just 20 minutes to sup off and go home before the Punch and Judy polliss comes creeping, peeping through the curtains.

Still, as in the New Year celebrations just past, pubs had to stop serving at half past midnight because in this post-Christian country it was held that anything more libertarian would traduce the Sabbath - which, technically, was the day previously, anyway.

Still there are stoppy-backs and lock-ins, blind eyes and deaf ears - the constabulary, happily, seems widely to be afflicted - and millions of us breaking nanny-state laws that should have been repealed half a century ago.

Periodically, including among the present government, there's talk of a wholesale reform that will at last treat those over 18 as adults. Still nothing happens to bring Britain in line with the rest of Europe. Perhaps like poor Jim Carter, Mr Straw is simply a little forgetful.

IT was nearly 24 years ago - yes, really - that President Jimmy Carter flew into the North-East, was awarded the Freedom of the City of Newcastle and planted a specially imported cherry tree (which turned out to have been dead on arrival) in old Washington. "Haway the lad" said the huge banner headline in the Echo, the editor himself despatched to report the proceedings.

Two months later, Carter was followed to the region by his mother-in-law, in 1982 by his 14-year-old daughter Amy and in 1987 he himself returned with the Tyneside Friendship Force.

Though the cuttings file is several inches thick, none of them mentions the traditional North-East courtesy of taking the guest for a swift one. Probably they were shut.

A STORY in The Guardian's diary column two days before Jimmy Carter landed claimed that the president hadn't wanted to venture so far north at all. Rather, he fancied a day with his feet up on Sunny Jim Callaghan's sheep farm.

It was picked up by the chap then writing the Echo's five-days-a-week John North column - good looking feller, Shildon lad - who raised it with North-West Durham MP Ernest Armstrong, the minister organising the visit.

Ernest was his usual cheery self. "You know what these diary columns are like, no one takes them seriously," he said. Our own diarist persisted. "You have to give these diary men some leeway," insisted Ernest - now succeeded by Hilary, his daughter - "I had the same sort of trouble filling it when I wrote a weekly column, and that was only on the Auckland Chronicle."

A PROBLEM which probably didn't worry them aboard Air Force One, Maurice Heslop, from Billingham, rings about the renewed concern over the danger of thromboses in long distance flight. (Gadfly, of course, is now one of journalism's leading authorities on the DVTs. Would that it were otherwise.) The latest advice is to get up and walk around the plane. On Maurice's recent turbulent crossing from the States, however, they were instructed throughout to fasten belts and stay seated.

"I even got told off for going to the toilet," he reports. There are clots and clots, of course.

ON the trains, meanwhile, things are slowly - well, quite quickly - returning to normal. It doesn't explain why, in the December/January issue of Livewire - GNER's free on-board magazine - the main news item is about new lines in the buffet car - "soupy-stew Stovepots, £3.50" - that the features include shark killing and curry eating but that there's not a single word of explanation or apology whatsoever.

BY train to Tyneside, where in Hebburn - home of the Orange Protestant Conservative Club and nothing to do with mobile phones - the town centre remained lustrously lit and handsomely decorated for Christmas. It was the evening of January 10. Like Roy Wood and Wizzard do they wish it could be Christmas every day, or - like the former landlord of the Coverbridge Inn - is South Tyneside Borough Council simply a little vague and forgetful, too?

...and finally, back to the demonised drink. Four months after Jim Carter was again allowed to sleep in his own North Yorkshire bed, we were sent to cover the 13th Commonwealth Games (and Scotch Pie Phantasamagoria) in Edinburgh.

On the final day, the demob delirious press pack decided on an uncharacteristically early start - some of the harbour front bars in the port of Leith served from 6am.

They were steady away, if not overflowing. Some were dockers at the end of a shift, others (not very sensibly) dockers about to start one. The white aproned barman assured us that there was never a ha'porth of bother, that when all-day opening meant what it said it was an incentive - not the opposite - to drink sensibly.

On that sober note, the Leith police dismisseth us