Mike Amos writes ...

There is little enough time to get wind as it is; it would not be possible properly to lead from the front.

Last Sunday afternoon, nonetheless, we went along for a band call.

They practise at the Territorial Army centre in Greenwell Road - "No smoking" notices in English and German, presumably in case of invasion.

"Admittedly you either love the pipes or loathe them," said Harry Clephane, drum major and band secretary and one of just three Scots among the 30 members.

"It's about pride, not just in the uniform but in learning to play properly. You can play for years and years and still have plenty to learn."

The armoury, where hangs a faded picture of a much younger royal couple, is now an instrument store. A surprisingly thin book called How to Play the Bagpipe contains familiar tunes like Bonnie Dundee and Scottish Soldier, less well known ones like the Barren Rocks of Aden.

The band struck up in 1962, became Grade Four world champions in the mid-1970s - the first non-Scottish band to achieve the distinction, even at the lowest competitive level - and after a year's silence was re-formed in 1997.

Now they are the only North-East pipe band with full ceremonial uniform - plaid, doublet, spats, cross-belts, the lot - and have played in Holland and at the Billingham Festival.

The full fig can cost £1,700, a set of pipes between £500 and £7,000. The band charges nothing for uniform, instruments or tuition, its money raised by public appearances and street performances - "busking, if you like," says Harry.

"It takes a lot of patience and dedication, but it's a lovely sound once you've learned it properly," says Pipe Major Paul Cook, like most of them a Newton Aycliffe lad. The youngest member, smart as a carrot, is drummer Cameron Dulston, aged nine.

Harry, whose brother was the Queen's piper - and who, it must be said, both looks and sounds the part - admits that the pipes have been known to frighten folk.

Once, it is said, the English outlawed them on the grounds that they were an instrument of war. "They even frighten me sometimes," said Harry.

A pipe band in Newton Aycliffe TA Centre isn't quite the same, say, as one marching down Princes Street, but they're dab hands (as the Scots say) for all that.

"I love it, it's brilliant when you really get into the rhythm," says 19-year-old leading tenor drummer Michelle Mlatilik, born in Bishop Auckland of Czech grandparents.

They played Scotland the Brave and Scottish Soldier and that tune about the famous Glasgow Rangers. They need sponsors, musicians of all abilities and none, probably even a Chieftain.

Though a kilt awaits, and the heart sings in tune, it is time to beat a retreat.

l Newton Aycliffe Royal British Legion Pipes and Drums practice on Wednesdays from 7-9pm and on Sunday from 2-5pm, when Alison Sinclair from Hartlepool also leads Scottish dancing classes for youngsters. The band is available for public performances for £140, or a "mini-band" for £80. Harry Clephane is on (01325) 300140, public relations officer and bass drummer Tony Fittes on (01325) 319219. On Saturday afternoon they play outside Marks and Spencer in Darlington.

IT'S 30 years today since Britain's currency went decimal, 30 years exactly - a pearl anniversary, say the jewellers - since Ian and Anne Richardson moved into the Joiners Arms at Hunwick, between Bishop Auckland and Willington.

A pint of Vaux Gold Tankard, Ian recalls, foamed from 1/9d to 9p overnight.

The transformation went generally smoothly, The Northern Echo recorded, except perhaps for Sandra Johnson whose mum rang Bishop Auckland General Hospital to report that she'd swallowed a new halfpenny.

The hospital later issued a bulletin: no change.

A packet of Daz in Newcastle Co-op had gone up from 3/4d on February 14 to 19p the next day, 20 Embassy were 26p but ten thirteen and a half pence and Mrs Ena Caygill from High Northgate, Darlington, rang us to complain that her weekly television rental had increased from 10/6d to 53p. Four days earlier, The Echo had carried an ominous, old money headline: "How long before a gallon of petrol costs 8s?"

Elsewhere in the news, Middleton-in-Teesdale's secondary school was to close after just 12 years, T Dan Smith was on trial, a colour television licence was going up to £12 and a railway porter in London had been told to cut back on his zealousness after chasing a litter dropper with a sickle.

Ian and Anne Richardson, pearls themselves, remember only the turmoil of joining the Joiners. We shall be in to toast their health before the good night is out.

APPROACHING D-Day, the Northern Echo also ran a help-line called Getting the Point, and there was nothing more to the point than the penny Arrow.

Remember the penny Arrow, a thin toffee bar made by Holland's in Southport? Though the price changed overnight to a new halfpenny, Stockton sweet shopkeeper James Wallace - unlike the young lady in Bishop Auckland - still found it hard to swallow.

"The kids used to get 12 for one shilling. How do you explain to them that for 5p, even an old shilling, they now only get ten?"

The bairns, as a good fletcher might say, were being shafted.

Since the Post Office was on strike, The Echo was unable to ring Holland's for a spot of feather ruffling.

Readers may nonetheless know where the Arrow fell - and if there's still anything, anywhere, for a penny.

WITHOUT much to go on, last week's column on the midnight masses at Chester-le-Street railway station noted that, through a door off the waiting room, sat the Sir Frank Pick Memorial Lavatory. Who was Sir Frank, we'd wondered, and why so indelibly immortalised?

For 31 years from 1909 he was the driving force of the London Underground, not just its traffic development officer but the man who inspired its visual arts, its world famed roundel and, indeed, much of its classic architecture.

"The greatest patron of the arts that this century has so far produced," wrote Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in 1942.

Thanks for information to John Briggs, Allen Nixon and, particularly, to Ian Reeve, BBC North-East's business and industry correspondent, who recalls that - like Guy Fawkes, the composer John Barry and Ian himself - Pick was an old boy of St Peter's school, York. Later he became renowned for his tub thumping talks at the Salem Chapel Guild in the city.

St Peter's, in fact, still offers an annual design prize in Sir Frank's memory. "For some reason," says Ian, "my efforts with yoghurt pots and string never managed to clinch it."

AND who, that same column asked, was Porterbrook - the name of the Type 47 diesel which pulled out train from Darlington to York last week?

"You may be disappointed to learn that it is not the name of a Victorian philanthropist or a sleepy hollow in a Thomas Hardy novel," writes Mark Harrington.

Porterbrook, a million miles more prosaically, is the train leasing subsidiary of Stagecoach.

BEFORE any of these thoughtful trains started running, a letter had arrived from Derek Parker in Bishop Auckland, concerning Polyphemus.

Derek's wife believes Polyphemus to be a Cyclops, a mythological one-eyed giant who tangled with Odysseus as our hero was returning from the wars. Derek, conversely, believes Polyphemus to have been locomotive number 45688 of the Jubilee class, an engine which - like many others - steams misty memories of carefree days in the black fifties.

Derek even encloses photocopied pages from his 1957 Ian Allan "combined" loco spotters' annual, half a guinea's worth, a line drawn gratifyingly beneath each "cop".

There's Llandudno, Lytham St Anne's and Lady Godiva. There are colonies, commanders and the Coronation class in which only 46121 - Highland Light Infantry, City of Glasgow Regiment - escaped pen and ruler.

How there came to be a steam engine named Polyphemus hasn't been explained, though it may simply underline the eternal wisdom of Erasmus - these columns' watchword, if ever..

In regione caecorum rex est lucus, wrote the old sage. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

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