IT was not quite a case of 'once more unto the breach, my friends' when retired headmaster Ray Shaw was asked, at an hour's notice, to address nearly 500 people in Darlington this week.

For such an emergency has not arisen for the town's venerable lecture association (founded 1882) for many years. Although there have been occasional close shaves, the billed speaker has almost invariably defeated flood, fog or snow to arrive on time at the College of Technology.

On Monday, however, first the railway timetable and then a two-hour delay at Heathrow meant that the Prisons Ombudsman, quite a coup for the association, was somewhere over the Midlands when Mr Shaw began to hold the fort.

The former head teacher of Mowden primary school rose to the occasion splendidly. His audience was engrossed in anecotes about world travels with the Friendship Force (founded by US president Jimmy Carter) when the breathless official attraction was hustled on to the stage some 30 minutes later.

Mr Shaw and his wife have especially enjoyed visits to Japan and have reciprocated the hospitality received there. His slides showed the cultural divide - and nowhere is it wider, it seems, than in the bathroom. In a Japanese home, the bath is not entered until the bather has scrubbed himself clean in a shower.

Saves water in the long run: the bathwater, deep and almost too hot to bear, is thus kept clean enough to be used unchanged by other members of the family. A shame there was no time for questions; that practice seems at odds with what we're often told about the puritan Japanese attitude to handkerchiefs and wiping-up cloths.

Another water-saving measure in sophisticated Tokyo toilets - where the Shaws found that heated lavatory seats are the norm and where they dared not experiment with some of the push-buttons built into the ceramic ware - is more ingenious: a kind of small washbasin, complete with tap, is built into the lid of the low-level cistern behind the lavatory pan.

Water used in obeying the now-wash-your-hands injunction drains into the cistern, to be re-used in the flushing of the toilet. At least that information enables me to re-cycle a piece of graffito added to the aforesaid hygiene notice in a Cambridge University toilet: 'Actually, you'll find that urine is sterile and poses no medical threat.'

Price of a pint

BAND A residents would pay an extra £1.10 a week, the equivalent of half a pint of beer, said Mr Barry Keel, Darlington council's chief executive, in defence of last week's announced hike in council tax.

Perhaps Mr Keel would be so kind as to let council tax payers know the name of his favourite watering hole so they can avoid it. £2.20 for a pint of good English ale, as opposed to fancy lagers, is well on the steep side for pubs in this area.

If he pays up for his ale without blinking, Spectator looks forward to enjoying his generous hospitality.