LIKE Miss Whiplash, the phrase "prima donna" is strictly feminine, literally translated as "first lady" but these days with overtones of temperament and egotism. Like Johnson's Baby Powder or the Christian name Pat, however, it is applied to both sexes - which brings us to Mr Pat Green, marketing director of the Black Sheep Brewery in Masham, North Yorkshire.

Among Mr Green's responsibilities is a free magazine called "Ewe 'r' Baa....red" - lovers of the subtle pun will appreciate the need for restraining quotation marks - full of similarly iniquitous word plays.

(Sample Ewe 'r' Baa....red joke: why did the Mexican push his wife off the cliff? Tequila.)

Though the magazine is largely produced out of house, Mr Green still writes an editorial and retains the right to vet the rest of it before publication.

Imagine his horror when his column was returned from the editing process the other day and - wait for it - whole words had been changed or omitted.

The marketing director immediately faxed back. "Mike Amos wouldn't stand for his copy being changed, so I'm not either." This, of course, is a calumny sufficient to make a real prima donna sign George Carman, though Mr Green is presently on honeymoon and unable cogently to explain himself.

We eagerly await his return. Nothing at all will have altered.

WHAT Pat Green considers so sacrosanct, so word perfect, is a column about a visit to a "famous purveyor of corrective eyewear". Others use an optician. What struck him, so far as can be seen, was that all the fixtures and fittings ("even the teeth") were brilliant white and the staff were dressed head to foot in black. "We were then 'processed' through the system and very efficient it was, but I couldn't help but feel that we were prisoners of SPECTRE...."

And so it goes on. Pat's column, unfortunately, has had to be cut.

COINCIDENCE if not quite serendipity, Mr David Greener - an MC who deserves a medal - cracked an optical joke at East Rainton Cricket Club's sportsmen's dinner last Friday.

"Did I tell you who I bumped into in Specsavers the other day?

"Aye, yer right, every bugger."

APART from Mother Goose, his bed and breakfast adviser in Upper Swaledale, William Hague seems surrounded by soothsayers and sycophants. Didn't any of them notice before Sunday's hour long documentary on the Conservative leader that the constantly recurring theme tune was the music from Trumpton? Trumpton is a children's television series starring firemen (as everyone over 40 knows) called Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb.

Though it is wholly charming, the programme's characters are wooden little Englanders whose greatest excitement is a leaking town hall roof and whose only ambition is to live long enough to be at the next band concert.

Though turned out in every episode, Trumpton's fire brigade has never once attended a fire. For Pugh, Pugh and company life's headiest adrenalin has been a chimney endangering the municipal greenhouse and the weekly band concert, in which they're also the musicians and the tune is always the same. Just like a stuck record. Didn't anyone play the Trumpton card to Oor Wullie?

AT the beginning of June, the Daily Mail's Answers to Correspondents page sought the longest time which had elapsed between a fire station attending blazes. Titillatingly tempted but contractually constrained, we declined to recount the legendary story of how we won a £5 bet with Mr Tom Guy, Reeth garage owner and fire station sub-officer and how there were three calls within 55 minutes one glorious Sunday morning after being none for almost three months. It wouldn't have been the record, anyway. As someone finally suggested to the Mail, that's surely held by Trumpton.

Heighington station, on the route of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, is a couple of miles from the village after which it is named - travellers who find that a bit frustrating, however, should certainly avoid Dent, high on the Settle and Carlisle. Dent station isn't just six miles from the little township, it's six miles from anywhere on earth.

In the week of the S&D's 175th anniversary, at any rate, a new passenger timetable was introduced. The upshot, as Paul Dobson from Bishop Auckland has discovered, is that while trains still stop at the station, it's impossible to buy a ticket there. Heighington has been "over-ridden" on the ticket machines. One day they were given a ticket to Newton Aycliffe, the next to North Road. What happens, asks Paul, if someone wants a return from Heighington to North Road, do they vanish up their own mini-computer?

"Is this a bad omen for the branch line?" he asks. "Will Heighington, and then Shildon, cease to exist altogether?"

HAD commitments allowed, we would certainly have looked into the Timothy Hackworth museum on Sunday to view the working model of Shildon station in the mid-20th Century. Endless childhood hours passed thereabouts, tirelessly train spotting. The station has gas lighting and bow legged porters, coal fires and red fire buckets, cops and cop-outs, streaks and miseries.

Inexplicably, however, the most vivid memory has always been of a yellow and blue advertising hoarding for Virol - "nervous people need it". What on earth was Virol, did it work and - in these balmy days - do nervous people still need it?

BACK briefly to Heighington, and a headline in last week's paper that the Cumby Arms - named after an admiral at the Battle of Trafalgar, not many people know that - had won the national dominoes title for the second successive year.

Before another word was read or domino laid, it was a certainty (and so it proved) that the team would include Norman Kent. Alan Stainsby was only marginally less likely.

They are domino nomads, six nights a week men, their homes overflowing with trophies. When next anyone suggests that dominoes is all luck, Norman Kent is the only argument required.

A LAST and authentic word from Ewe 'r' Baa...red. When the Lord of the Manor came back from a day's hunting, it explains, the venison would be roasted for the evening's banqueting whilst the servants were allowed only the offal, known otherwise as the 'umbles. "To make this more palatable," adds the magazine, "the entrails were made into a pie."

Only the poor workers had it plonked before them, of course - hence the original phrase about eating 'umbles pie. Prima donna or only 'umble, we return - changeless - next Wednesday. If it's a feller, it's primo donna, anyway