LAST back end some of our neighbours' homes were devastated by the floods. Just as finally they're drying out, humping away the sandbags and looking forward to what may masquerade as summer, the families round about have received another worrying letter from Richmondshire Council's environmental health people.

They now have amosite as well.

Whilst it's something they may long have suspected - amositis, at any rate - it's all they need just now.

But what is this amosite, and what can the neighbours do about it? The diagnosis at the foot of the column.

THE rest of the North-East appears, Triffid-like, to be overrun with mondegreens. Tom Purvis in Sunderland suggests they've been around since Davy Crockett was killed in a bar when he was only three, followed closely by Glenn Campbell, the nine stone cowboy.

A mondegreen, as last week's column noted, is a misheard song lyric, though both Ian Andrew in Lanchester and Ian Forsyth in Durham had difficulty with the Lord's Prayer, too.

"Our Father, we chart in Heaven, Harold be thy name," began the infant Andrew, whilst at Newbottle Junior Mixed. Young Forsyth became quite concerned about the witch, wicked or otherwise, that art in heaven.

John Todd in Barton, near Darlington, broke off from trying to discern the lyrics of Judy in Disguise by John Fred and the Playboys - "probably the only pop song to name-check the living bra" - to offer his mondegreen top ten.

The most curious is from Jeff Beck's Hi-ho Silver Lining, impossible to decide which the authentic verse and which the cloth-eared account. "Flatter in your peach suit baby" appears to be the mishearing"; "Flies are in your pea soup, baby" the strange reality.

John also offers "Ah, why don't you come out you reckless bum" when The Four Seasons (in Sherry) actually thought she had a red dress on and even a cartoon. Return to Sender, as Elvis probably observed.

Several readers recalled the cat that chewed your new shoes - a cat, it transpired, from Chatanooga - or were convinced that Desmond Dekker's ears were alight when all he was trying to do was sing about the Israelites.

Chris Willsden, his time at Boy Scouts wasted, swore that he was being prepared to slide a gong on the chest of a slave; the Rev Tony Buglass in Pickering was convinced in his Radio One incarnation that Carly Simon's heartache was due to something she'd eaten - hard egg - and that Sarah Brightman fell in love, not with a starship trooper, but with a draught excluder.

Chris Greenwell's daughter thought that Paul Young's larcenous lyrics ran: "Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you", Kevin O'Beirne insists that half those who've heard Bohemian Rhapsody not only believe that Beelzebub had "a devil for a sideboard, me" but that the same classic song has a line which apparently refers to someone's pork sausages.

Perhaps fortunately, he can't remember the real words.

Janis Bright believed that "Tonight I'll be staying here with you" began - "Throw my chicken out the window" - it probably did, it was Bob Dylan - Clive Sledger laboured long in the pious belief that "Forever in Blue Jeans" referred to an oddly named clergyman, the Reverend Blue Jeans, Colin Randall's formative years in Shildon were marked by the unfathomable misunderstanding that the Bee Gees' young lady was coming to them on a submarine.

Others believed it to be a summer breeze and breeze, of course, it is.

DENNY Gorman in Horden may have a point, however, in suggesting that the "ultimate mondegreen" is the children's song from way back that seems to say:

Maisy dotes and dozy dotes

And little lambsy divies,

A kiddilty tivvy to

Wouldn't you.

The truth of the maze is rather different:

Mares eat oats and does eat oats

And little lambs eat ivy

A kid will eat ivy, too

Wouldn't you.

The song, sung very quickly, then continues:

If the words aren't clear

And funny to your ear,

A little bit jumbled and jivy....

It then does it syllable by syllable, and with the Gadfly column you learn something every day.

WE'D mentioned daft titles and improbable rhymes, too. Redcar and East Cleveland council leader David Walsh suggests "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy" - it's American, adds David, perhaps unnecessarily - whilst to prove such things are on the brain, Kevin O'Beirne recalls a Ramones number called Teenage Lobotomy which may offer the most gloriously improbable rhyming couplet of all time:

Now I guess I'll have to tell 'em

That I've got no cerebellum...

Perhaps more on the old grey matter (as the late Father Ted used to say) next time.

SINCE the mondegreen party also mentioned Jimi Hendrix - Excuse me while I kiss the sky/This guy; delete according to taste - Neil Sears seeks memories of the long gone night that Hendrix played above (or possibly below) the Imperial in Darlington.

"Did he burn his guitar and set Darlo alight or did he play to a crowd of six who assumed he'd never make it?" asks Neil.

No strings attached, maybe someone can remember that great night, as well?

YET more attentive readers - Ken Pellant in Guisborough, Peter Elliott in Eaglescliffe, Jon Smith in Barningham - demand a correction to a correction.

Sherlock Holmes lived neither at 23a Baker Street (March 28) nor 22b, as we amended on April 4. It was 221b.

The real mystery isn't why we so often got the wrong number, however, but whether Holmes ever suggested that his methods were elementary.

Rarely wrong, Kevin O'Beirne suggests that he didn't. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations insists otherwise in lines from The Crooked Man:

"Excellent," I cried.

"Elementary," said he.

PERHAPS it will become a three-pipe problem, in which case we may also need recourse to Jon Smith's hoary old joke about Watson's search for something with which to clean out his friend's meerschaum.

The middle bit may best be forgotten, the punchline has Holmes turning to his friend: "Hell, he meant a reamer, dear Watson."

SO at last, a red light to the mondegreens and to this compendious readers' digest. Though much remains unsaid - not least about the mystery of the Lenten rhyme that begins "Tid, mid, misere" and about Prefab Sprout, Witton Gilbert lads made good - time and space (in which the great hymnist H F Lyte reminds us we are all dwellers) cry enough.

Amosite, it must finally be explained, is a partial acronym of Asbestos Mines of South Africa and according to the Oxford English Dictionary is "a form of asbestos found only in certain areas of South Africa".

There and in the garage roofs of some of Gadfly's unfortunate neighbours. Happily there is no great cause for alarm. We return, fireproofed, in two weeks.

Published: Wednesday, April 11, 2001