SIR WALTER SCOTT, he who wrote the most evocative hymn to the glories of an Arriva bus route yet to appear in literature, also coined a memorable metaphor for his unbounded curiosity: "I would like to be there, were it but to see how the cat jumps."

He has made regular guest appearances in the column over the past year and it was in the first of these, when quotations from his epic poem Rokeby - romance and derring-do in Teesdale during the Civil War - had us on the front seats upstairs in a double-decker, service 75 from Darlington.

It was meandering to the market town that the Queen Mother used to call Barney during her girlhood visits there - or, less prosically, to the place where the poet had moonlight fleeting across "Barnard's towers and Tees's stream." We enjoyed views over "sweet Winston's woodland scene" and "the dance on Gainford-green."

And Scott's curiosity? A prime example was his insistence (after breaking his journey from Scotland to call on his old friend J B S Morritt at the latter's Rokeby mansion at Greta Bridge, near Barnard Castle) on making a dangerous landing on a volanic islet lately erupted from the sea off Sicily.

The three-mile island, 200ft high, had only weeks earlier in 1831 been claimed for Britain and named Graham Island, after the first lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham. The captain of the Royal Navy frigate which was giving the ailing Scott a Mediterranean cruise was reluctant to risk the life of the national institution in his care but was overruled by the great man.

Scarcely had HMS Barham resumed its voyage when the new dot on the map disappeared into the briny. A year ago the underwater volcano erupted again and its lava-covered pinnacle is expected to break surface at any moment, to resume an island story first recorded in 10 BC.

The bad news is that this time the Italians have been first to raise their flag there - and I imagine that they have been allowed to do so only because the Royal Navy cannot spare so much as an inflatable from its sadly depleted fleet. In the year 2001, if some literary giant like J K S Rowling was to wilt under the strain of a thousand book-signings, the Admiralty would be hard pushed to lay on a recuperative trip to the Isle of Wight.

Alas, it has been left to the Sicilians to row out from the town of Sciacca, 30 miles away, to hold a nationalistic ceremony at the spot where the sea is bubbling fiercely and the air is thick with smoke. Filmed from a flotilla of television crews, Prince Carlo di Bourbon lowered a plaque through only 20ft of water to lay claim to the emerging summit.

It was his ancestor Ferdinand II who in 1831 sent a warship to 'Fermandea' to tear down the Union Flag which on July 18 that year had been planted by a British naval party led by Capt Humphrey Le Fleming Senhouse. The Bourbon King of Naples saw the island as a potentially strategic base; after all, it was about twice the size of another volanic island which somehow manages to support a community, the Bounty mutineers' Pitcairn.

The French also stormed ashore to stake their claim, making the situation 50pc worse than in the South Atlantic. There, the quarrel was only Falklands/Malvinas; here, since the French also gave the place a name, the imbroglio was Graham/Fernandea/Giulia. We didn't want to fight but, by jingo...

But, then, on January 12, 1832, the problem was solved when the island sank back beneath the waves. Oh, that such as the Middle East might change from being merely volatile to become, suddenly, submersibly volcanic.

Within months of returning from his Mediterranean cruise, Sir Walter Scott reached the end of a richly fulfilled life, one in which he had "been there" in profusion and described compellingly for generations of readers exactly how innumerable cats jumped.

COINCIDENCE is one of the tastier spices of life. Sir Walter Scott touched another of the Past Lives of the year 2000 besides that of the above John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, the traveller, classical scholar and 1814-18 MP for Northallerton.

Morritt was so close to Scott that he was one of the very few to whom the writer confided his authorship of the Waverley series of novels; for years, the fact that such as Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midlothian and Guy Mannering were being written anonymously was a literary sensation. Scott even solemnly assured the Prince Regent the works were not his and it eventually emerged that the author's contract with his publishers, Constable, promised him £2,000 compensation should they spill the beans.

Yet I now learn that William Bewick, the Darlington painter whose coveted commission to copy Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel went so tragically wrong for him, came close to stumbling upon Scott's secret.

As he left Abbotsford after drawing Scott's portrait, Bewick was asked by the writer to deliver a package to his publishers in Edinburgh. But his arrival at the office, to hand over what he was he certain was the manuscript of some work in progress, threw the people there into some confusion; they snatched the parcel and he sensed their embarrassment at the possibility that he might learn exactly what was in it.

Not long after, when Scott finally acknowledged his authorship of mere novels, as opposed to that of the much more respectable genre of poetry, Bewick was convinced that he had been within but brown-paper thickness of discovering that he was carrying Waverly contraband, as it were.

AS IT happens, a book just published has confirmed for me just how good an artist Bewick was. My piece a few weeks ago included his drawing of William Hazlitt, still renowned as England's great essayist. A review of the new book, which tells of his delight in baiting the Wordsworth school of poets and how to his enemies he was a "sour, sneering republican cheered only by Napoleon's victories," was illustrated by Hazlitt's self-portrait.

The two portraits are unmistakably of the same man. Bewick captured Hazlitt in profile exactly as the writer and philosopher saw himself full-face. Of course, the comparison is even more a tribute to Hazlitt; painting, after all, was not his day job.

Another Scottish icon also made a guest appearance in the two-parter here about another local painter who, like Bewick, found himself sidelined by the art establishment of the Royal Academy. He was Julius Caesar Ibbetson, whose grave in Masham churchyard was drawn to my attention by a reader; he illustrated some of Robert Burns's best-known verses, notably the moment that Tam o'Shanter cried 'Weel done, Cutty Sark!' in admiration of a nubile witch dancing wildly in a ghostly churchyard