PERFECTLY timed to mark a personal milestone, a report in last Wednesday's south-west Durham edition noted that St John's primary school in Shildon - built just 30 years ago - is to be replaced at a cost of "at least £3m".

The rooms were "cold and dark", it was explained, and the environment wasn't very nice.

Barely a mile away, red brick and foursquare, stands Timothy Hackworth primary - where the column had its fetchings up. If it were cold and dark, we never noticed.

A plaque at the top of the stairs marks the school's official opening: 1911, memory suggests, but on any argument an awfully long time before the 1970s.

That Wednesday afternoon, I walked back around the school yard where we played skip-jack and hum-dum-dum, where we raced our half crown Masseratis and where we formed a disorderly queue.

Nothing much had changed. Even the wrought iron gate still simply said "Boys". Boys will be.

That same day, coincidentally, Chris Lloyd's "Echo Memories" column in the same edition noted that the railway pioneer Timothy Hackworth, after whom the school and much else in Shildon is named, also built to last.

It is all further proof that the old 'uns are the best 'uns. Since yesterday's milestone marked 40 years in journalism, it is to be hoped that the inky trade agrees.

ANOTHER coincidence: after a week in the Northern Despatch's head office in Darlington, I was banished to the only branch office, penuriously perched above a money lender's in Bishop Auckland.

It would be nice to claim that exile had been precipitated by the first day incident of the string in the works canteen cabbage - to imagine the manageress's reaction to the complaint, think Oliver and Bumble, the beadle - but in truth it had been agreed in advance.

Bishop office was wonderful but (shall we say) unstructured. The Despatch chief reporter was a chap of 60 or so called Harry Stott, known as Aristotle, whose great personal charm was matched only by his uniquely hapless incompetence.

Directionless that first morning, I ventured back to school - which the week previously had been searched by police after an "IRA" telephone caller threatened to blow it up.

Though the caller had probably just stumbled out of the Red Lion, the "bomb" was due to detonate that Monday morning. "Some of the children were probably disappointed," said one of the teachers, wisely adding that the sensible way to deal with such idiots would be to let it die a natural death.

The non-story was duly telephoned to the Despatch. It didn't appear. In the following day's Northern Echo, however, amid reports that Reeth Rural Council had approved by four votes to two a fruit machine in the Punch Bowl, that Cow Green might be flooded and that Newton Aycliffe was to get its second smokeless zone, three paragraphs appeared at the foot of page three.

"School bomb let down" read the headline, rather curiously and, beneath it, "By a Shildon reporter".

It was the first story I ever had in the Echo, and the last for another four years. "By a Shildon reporter" will still do very nicely.

A COUPLE of years later, the Echo staff in that little coterie above the money lender's was joined by Bill Taylor, a tremendous character whose claims to fame - as possibly we have noted before - included knowing by heart the epic song to the tune of the French national anthem about the missing toilet paper. Long in Canada, Bill has again emailed about recent columns on improbable place names.

His wife Lesley, he says, grew up near Intercourse in Pennsylvania ("The story is that they made it up to attract tourists") while there's also Come-by-Chance, Dildo and Bird-in-Hand.

Bird-in-Hand is an Amish community, populated by the sect whose simple lifestyle eschews everything from electricity to zip fasteners and which uses horse drawn buggies as the only means of transport.

Hence, says Bill incorrigibly, the "old" joke about what goes "Clip-clop, bang, clip-clop, clip-clop".

An Amish drive-by shooting.

WHAT Bill really wanted to recall was a visit 11 years ago to Hell, in Michigan, where he'd gone to write about Hell freezing over. That day the mercury rose unseasonably. Not a snowball's.

It's a quaint little place with a post office called the Devil's Den but where they grow rather tired of telephone calls - "from as far away as New Zealand," Bill reported - asking what the temperature is.

"Gee," the caller replies, "it's hotter than Hell down here."

With the exception of a disaffected young lady and a couple of half-frozen dogs with Hellish nether regions, he concluded that most people loved it there.

Hell was heaven on earth.

REVIEWING a little volume called Mingin' and Blingin', last week's column also noted that "Wife beater" was popular among the younger generation as an "affectionate" nickname for Stella Artois lager. Not in south London, it's not.

In a Blackheath pub a few weeks back, David Walsh from Redcar was surprised to hear a fellow customer order a pint of Nelson and even more surprised when he was at once served with a pint of Stella.

David asked him. "You know," he said, "Nelson Mandela, Stella."

Rhyming slang resounds again.

ERIC Gendle in Middlesbrough wonders about another curious expression, much favoured by Richie Benaud in his incomparable Channel 4 cricket commentaries. Instead of home and dry, Richie supposes teams on the brink of success - England, usually - to be home and hosed.

Benaud, it may be recalled, is also sometimes credited with the line about it being black over Bill's mother's, though the Bishop Auckland Cricket Club origins are more convincing.

"Home and hosed" is familiar in the antipodes, the best bet that it comes from the turf. When a horse is home and hosed it's back in its box, hosed down and safe.

Itself at the end of another outing, the column now has a short sojourn out to Hebridean grass. We return on September 14.

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