A FEW minutes ago they changed the computer on this desk, and just as I was getting the hang of the old one. Not even 15 years had elapsed.

The oftcumden incorporates a virtual machine, apparently, and that's not virtually but utterly incomprehensible. It has a flat screen, an optic mouse, a glossary of weasel words and occasionally it coughs discreetly, as Jeeves might have done during one of Bertie's more spectacularly vacuous moments.

"If I may make so bold, Sir..."

That's before we talk cutting and pasting. Cutting and pasting is what me Aunty Betty did with wallpaper, and if anybody had the hang of wallpapering it was dear old Aunty Betty. In her day, happily, a PC was a polliss and a mouse ate cheese.

It's mentioned now because, like the long anticipated day when a large white space corrals a simple black message - "He couldn't think of anything to write about" - there may well be a doodle pad where today's column is meant to be.

I shall be away with the pixies, or - at very least - in fairy Dell.

THOUGH the technology may be new, old habits die hard. The link with cut and paste is therefore macaroni, upon which we chewed last week. We'd invited a top 30 hit with "macaroni" in the lyrics, ultimately providing the answer that it was Bangers and Mash by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren.

Margaret Ray in Durham recalls that the song was from the 1960 film The Millionairess, starring Alastair Sim, Alfie Bass and Miriam Karlin as well as Sellers and Loren but described in Hellliwell's Film Guide as a "messy travesty....lacking humour, cohesion or continuity".

Several readers also recall Boney Maroney, a 1958 hit for Larry Williams - he who also sang Short Fat Fannie and Dizzy Miss Lizzie - in which macaroni gets another name-check. Dick Fawcett even provides the lyrics:

I got a girl name of Boney Maroney

She's as skinny as a stick of macaroni

Oughta see her rock 'n'roll with her blue jeans on

She's not very fat, just skin and bo-o-one.

A reader in Sedgefield suggests Macaroni the Lonely by Roy Orbison. Unfortunately he has been disqualified.

DAVID Walsh in Redcar, another of the skeleton crew who recalls Boney Maroney, points out that it shared the top 20 with songs like The Story of My Life by Michael Holliday (who ended his life not long afterwards) and The Whole World in His Hands, by Lawrie London.

London was a 13-year-old, spotted on a close circuit version of the Six-Five Special. The song only made number 12 over here but in America became the biggest 1950s hit by a British male singer.

Whole world in his hands? Last heard of, he was working in the clothing industry in the capital.

WE'D bumped into Boney Maroney, formerly Melodie Staniforth from Holmfirth, at a Monster Raving Loony Party gathering in the summer of 2004. Mind, there wasn't much on her.

The party's deputy leader, she campaigned under the slogan: "Vote for insanity, you know it makes sense."

Old Boney had garnered 571 votes against William Hague in Richmond in the 2001 election - Mad Cow managed 201 in Sunderland South - and planned to stand against Tony Blair in Sedgefield last year with a manifesto - flesh on the bones - that included heated toilet seats for pensioners.

"I think Blair's beatable, partly because of his problems and partly because they haven't seen my yellow skeleton suit yet," she said at the time.

Sadly, her potty platform was fatally undermined when The Guardian called her "easily the most sensible of the Loonies". Her 157 votes still left her 24,000 behind the Prime Minister.

RECENT columns have also disinterred journalistic howlers. Tony Eaton in Brompton, Northallerton, recalls watching the television news when a reporter, asked how the space launch had gone, replied that it went like clockwork.

"Ever since," says Tony, "I've had visions of a rocket soaring away with a large key in the side, slowly unwinding."

ANOTHER launch, a reader in exalted circles - and who therefore doesn't want his name going around - remembers when One NorthEast came up with the "rather prosaic" slogan "Right Here, Right Now."

The regional development agency probably paid someone thousands for those four words.

Thus enriched, they then had the idea of asking Tony Blair, on a visit to Sedgefield, officially to launch the campaign.

"Several people felt obliged to point out that, despite all the odd directions New Labour had taken, that sign might not be the most appropriate set of words for a Labour prime minister to be photographed alongside," he says.

They got someone else instead.

BACK on a musical note, an email has arrived from Mr Christopher Wardell in Darlington regarding the karaoke at the Nags Head - a pub two minutes walk from the Echo office.

He may even have been expecting a reply, but the technology appears not to be responding.

The Nags, it may be recalled, is a yard from the spot where the homeward bus now departs. As if oft-interminable waits weren't enough, karaoke night plunges life's temperature several degrees further towards absolute zero.

It is Carlsberg fuelled and cacophonous, a medley unchained as a rebellious Rottweiler might be, a tune carried on a tumbril of self-delusion before mercilessly being taken to the guillotine.

Christopher disagrees. "I often visit the Nags Head in the hope of finding the next big singing sensation," he writes.

"While most of the contestants may be no Robbie Williams or Shirley Bassey, they give their all and sing finely to the weekly packed houses of music and booze enthusiasts."

Like karaoke evenings, it gets worse. Every Easter there's a competition called the Nags Factor at which talent is judged by local entertainer Mr Dingy Dong, by "multi-instrumentalist" Keith I'Anson and by Mr Wardell himself.

The column has now been invited for an Easter treat.. How could we possibly miss the bus?

STILL with noisy pubs, the weekend's papers carried the story that Wetherspoon's previously peaceable outlets are now to have large, flat screen televisions. The thought is horrifying, the accompanying verbiage more offensive yet. The televisions, reported most of the media, are to be "rolled out".

It is one of those faddish phrases which users suppose endues them with some spurious sense of being fashionable. In truth it is egregious (and idle) in the extreme.

The televisions will arrive in boxes, just like this cussed computer. Back next week, and with only the expletives deleted.

Published: 25/01/2006