WORD games, as ever, last week's column moved mellifluously from oxymorons to those rare terms which appear to be a negative but which have no recognised positive.

P G Wodehouse probably provided the best remembered example: "He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

What, we'd wondered, might be the collective noun for such ostracised adjectives?

Pete Winstanley, up Chester-le-Street way, not only disputes the premise - his Collins dictionary includes words like "gruntled", "couth" and "kempt", albeit with the suggestion that they are archaic - but offers an ingenious collective. Collins also includes "azygous", defined as unpaired, from the Greek a ("absent") and zygon ("yoke.")

Can you imagine, asks Pete, one of those abandoned words - disgruntled, if ever - wondering what's become of his mate. "'As 'e gone?" the poor adjective might ask and azygons - surely for etymological eternity - those little orphan anomalies now become.

PETE Winstanley is one of those occasional correspondents - like Sherlock Holmes's Baker Street Irregulars, as unfailing as they are intermittent - beloved by columns such as these.

Unfailingly intermittent may, in truth, be another oxymoron, and we are also grateful to those who have recalled the aphorism that fighting for peace is like doing the other thing for virginity. Maybe we should invite favourite graffiti, though some would say that the writing's been on the wall long enough already.

It is, at any rate, to the Case of the Crooked Keyhole to which we first proceed with caution. Holmes and Watson stagger back to No. 23a after a night on the town, fumble for a key and find that it is unable to turn in the lock. Watson, as usual, hasn't a clue. Holmes at once takes a lemon from his pocket, squeezes it into the lock and the door flies open.

"Holmes, once again you amaze me," cries the faithful doctor. "How in great heaven's name did you manage to do that?" The Great Detective is as condescending as ever. "Ah," he says, "lemon entry my dear Watson."

BUT back to Pete Winstanley. Like most of these columns' 22 carat correspondents, we have never met. A pint is therefore proposed, probably at the Lambton Hounds in Pity Me where he enjoys an early doors drink after mulling over the nearby council tip, and will shortly be seconded.

His good friend Bill, who (inexplicably) regards young Winstanley as a "leftist looney", will probably join the early doors assembly.

Bill's also an avid Echo man, though - like so many more - turns first to the death notices. It would be a journalist of the most colossal conceit who ever supposed that it to be otherwise.

GEORGE Stanworth, another of the Irregular as Clockworkers, made an unscheduled appearance among the death notices last Wednesday. Like so many more, he wrote only when he had something to say and therefore said much in little, or multum in parvo as the Romans rather more fetchingly phrased it.

George lived in Billingham, had poked his head over most of these multi-faceted parapets - even the Eating Owt column, golf club breakfasts - and also had his signature on Hear All Sides.

"George was a good friend who didn't suffer fools gladly and was always ready to call a spade a spade," writes Syd Hodgson, also from Billingham.

"He was well known in golf and Masonic circles. A crack over a pint with George was usually amusing and interesting."

We'd not met George, either. Everything suggests, however, that Syd Hodgson was right in every respect.

IT has been the most doleful of winters, and not just measured in rain barrels. Last week's paragraph on the passing of Newton Aycliffe councillor Tony Moore - his funeral last Thursday made yet more poignant by a lachrymose rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone - was followed by a note from Stephen Smailes, Conservative leader on Stockton Council, recalling the Great Easter Monday Walk, circa 1975.

There were three of us, Durham to Darlington and one or two stopwatched beer breaks in between. Memory suggests, though Stephen doesn't, that he arrived last. We all remained friends thereafter.

"Tony was the only councillor I have ever known to beat the political system for so long and, remember, this was in Labour's heartland," writes Stephen. "Politically we were poles apart, but he was true champion of the people, a man of real integrity, simply the best."

IT'S late March, anyway, and after some elbow nudging hereabouts, Out of Date Information Darlington has finally changed its display at the railway station. A bit too late for January and February, but "Events 2001" is finally available.

FROM Darlington to Kings Cross on Sunday, early as usual on the way down - that is to say up, railwaymen will understand - punctual on the return.

When it is good, GNER is very, very good, not least with a Weekend First ticket - £48 return and with unlimited coffee and biscuits. (Though we'd ordered one half an hour previously, the forgetful waitress inadvertently sold the last breakfast baguette. "You can have a bite of my chip butty," she said cheerfully, and won marks for that, an' all.)

A note from John Harrison in Darlington, however, inexorably draws the gaze back to the disaster at Great Heck and to the fencing on bridges over the east coast main line.

The Echo has already highlighted flimsy fencing at places like Plawsworth, north of Durham. John points to a similar problem near Croft, in North Yorkshire. "The only thing stopping you passing off the road and dropping onto the railway line is a bit of rickety old wooden fencing."

That, of course, and the intention to remain on the straight and narrow.

Making all bridges crash proof is financially impossible. The one in a billion tragedy at Great Heck was probably what the insurance firms call an act of God, and that could be greatest oxymoron of all.

LAST week's note on no-nonsense Judge Myrella Cohen reminded fellow journalist Gavin Ledwith in West Rainton that Judge Angus Stroyan took no prisoners - shamelessly to corrupt the metaphor - either.

Judge Stroyan, memory further suggests, lived in Whaston, near Richmond, but has now retired to his family seat in Scotland where he sits in judgement as president of the local deer conservation society.

Gavin, at any rate, remembers a defence plea at Durham Crown Court. "Your honour," said counsel. "My client has greatly mended his ways of late and has learned much from this unfortunate incident. I would most humbly suggest that his sentence is measured in months, rather than years."

Judge Stroyan sighed. "Very well, then, you will go to prison for 60 months."

...and a final thought from Pete Winstanley, possibly via the immortal Sam Spudikins. "If you hit the nail on the head, you are bound to miss the point," he suggests by way of philosophical conundrum.

Hammer and tongs, again, in seven days.

Published: Wednesday, March 28, 2001