A POT-POURRI of a column, or rag-bag as the churlish might assert, in which we shall honour old friends, dig six feet deep, essay a veritable compendium of word games and ponder what might be read into the human posterior. The bottom line, as it were.

Firstly, however, a letter to the Daily Mail from Alan Clark in Darlington. On both 15-to-One and The Weakest Link, he says, it was stated that ten different British Prime Ministers had served under Elizabeth II. Mr Clark's tale is that it's 11; who, he wonders, is right?

The telly is, though one was PM twice. Before the pot-pourri loses its scent, readers are invited to name them, with a time bonus for chronological order. An answer before the prorogation.

IT'S the Prime Minister, of course, who ultimately, officially, decides who's in the "Queen's" honours lists - a select society for which the column is from time to time privately invited to support nominations.

It has been like hanging a millstone, not a medal, around the poor postulant's neck. Until now they've all gone unrewarded.

No longer. The most joyous congratulations to Nellie Bowser, so warm, wonderful and thoroughly deserving that not even the Gadfly blackspot could deny her an MBE in the New Year's list.

Nellie's around 80 now, forced out of London during the blitz and still possessed of a Petticoat Lane accent despite 60 years in Co Durham. (Aincher, me duck?)

Almost 40 years ago, Nellie and her equally marvellous mate Mary Hodgson began a broadcasting service at Tindale Crescent hospital, near Bishop Auckland. For more than 30 years they have organised an annual garden party, and much else, to fund what sometimes are termed patient comforts.

Friends of the Hospital, they were called, and with Friends like Nellie and Mary, Tindale hospital couldn't go wrong.

Latterly they'd also helped send relief convoys to places like Kosovo and Romania. "If Nellie Bowser and Mary Hodgson aren't in the New Year honours list," we wrote on July 9, 1999, "then Britain has no justice whatever." We'd forgotten that Mary had already been honoured. Nellie now joins her, and never too late.

As the Norwegian Polar explorer Fridtjof Hansen first observed, it's the difficult which takes a little time. The impossible may take a little longer.

JUNE Whitfield OBE, probably honoured because of some of the horrors she's had to work opposite, was also included in the "Quotes" column in this week's Observer. There are three ages of man, quoth June, youth, middle age and "My word, you do look well."

Very droll, but it was from Denis Weatherley, the column's old headmaster at Bishop Grammar and one of the region's best known singers, from whom we first heard the doleful adage.

It was outside Burger King in Darlington that similarly we had greeted him, and similarly earned that most gentle of rebukes. Two months later, whilst singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot at a concert in Nottingham, Denis died as he would have wished.

SO greatly asking for trouble it might as well have had a pee against the police station door, Sunday's Observer also carried a paragraph on the retirement of "Britain's oldest hair stylist", aged 81.

Dozens of others will now claim still to be cutting it, what's known in the trade as Three Head Syndrome - "write about a chap with two heads and as sure as apples someone will ring next day to say he has three" - and never more memorably underlined than in the case of Britain's oldest gravedigger.

He was 79-year-old Johnny Parmley from Castleside, near Consett, claimed the John North column in May 1976. He wasn't. A few days later someone called about 86-year-old Ted Close, still digging at Hunton, near Bedale - and at Patrick Brompton and Hornby, too - for around a fiver a day. "He digs a first class grave," the vicar generously observed.

Ted thus became Britain's senior sexton, at least until 1977 when Wee Willie Jarrold surfaced at Wistow, near York. Willie was 89, five feet tall, and to help put his time in wound the church clock, too.

In the matter of hair styling, alas, the Observer has been caught by the short and curlies.

WORD games? From the Derby Evening Telegraph, Tony Gdula sends a report of Darlington FC's recent defeat at Chesterfield. "You have to feel sorry for their gallant band of supporters who, near the end, offered the plaintiff chant 'We only want one shot'."

Quakers fans may presently be more plaintive than plaintiff. As the slide continues, of course, George's boys aren't out of jail just yet.

GRAMMARIANS call such things homophones, like the large advert for media sales advisors - "Have you got flare and ambition?" - in the Herald and Post on Teesside.

The Gadspy who sent it craves diplomatic anonymity. "To my knowledge the only flares we get on Teesside are from the Wilton works site," he says, "and the clothes of a few old hippies clinging to their life form in the bustling back streets of Saltburn."

STILL on Teesside, Eric Gendle lived near a bakery cum caf in Nunthorpe which offered "Cups of tea or coffee, to take out or sit in."

Driving on the North Yorkshire moors the other day, Eric also spotted signs near Old Byland - "Prohibited of driving any vehicle over Caydale Mill Ford" - which may have been written by the same person who penned the notes on the box of the "Super Speed Road Race Set" which Clive Sledger, near Richmond, bought his grandson for Christmas.

Every Styles Fully Wonderful.

Many Colors A Lot, Selected Freely By Yourself.

All Kinds Of Toys Are Sclected (sic) Freely By You!

Simulating The True Styles And Making Carefully.

ON the grounds that "he" was only 84 (and a half), the column before Christmas reported a protest from an "anonymous gentleman" at our use of the word "old" before his name. The "gentleman" proves to be a female, called Mary. "I realise you are a clever writer but to change me from a mother of six to an anonymous gentleman is a bit much," she writes. Like the column's own fallibility, some things just never change.

SO just before that long promised bottom line, the chronological list of Britain's ten premiers since 1951: Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson - who liked the job so much he did it twice - Edward Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.

Back to basics, as Mr Major was given to observing, the Church Times reports on the clairvoyant who charges £30 for reading backsides, what might be termed a rear view mirror.

"I just look for the shape of the bottom and how it hangs," she says.

"Clients want to find out about people who have passed over more than anything. Dead people do come through because the bottom is kind of like a channel. It's a focal point, like a crystal ball."

The lady who has so mesmerised the Church Times is Ms Sam Amos, clearly one of the family. Another prophet Amos rag-bag next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/ gadfly.html