THE most extraordinary fact of the week comes from the Royal Horticultural Society. It says that 47 per cent of front gardens in the North-East are at least three-quarters paved over.

This makes the region's front gardens the most paved over in the entire country. By quite some way, too. Scotland has the second most paved over front gardens (31 per cent) and London - even though on every visit it appears to be disappearing under a suffocation of tarmacadam - is bottom with just 14 per cent.

Quite cheerfully, the RHS is at a loss to explain its statistics, which were created by Mori. However, it advises finding holes in the concrete to plant creeping jenny, bugle and thyme which, the survey says, don't mind being driven over.

Such statistical aberrations should be cherished, even if they are not fully understood. This, then, joins my two other favourite fascinating and inexplicable pieces of trivia: in 1939, Darlington had more cinema seats per head of population than any other town in Britain; in 2004 Darlington had more hair cutting businesses per head of population than any other town in the country.

Any similar useless regional stats would be most welcome.

OF course, it all boils down to cars, and one of the most perplexing issues of the moment is why garages believe giant inflatable characters help sell vehicles.

In Darlington there is a battle between a garage boasting a 20ft Frankenstein's monster and another with a supersize King Kong (who, curiously, appears to have very bad decay in one of his premolar teeth). In North Yorkshire, there is apparently a huge peripatetic caveman who tours from garage to garage ready to be inflated at a moment's notice, while the garages of Teesside have a weird penchant for attaching barrage balloons to their roofs and flying them so high in the sky you can't read the logo.

Other than providing a source of entertainment - the sight of car salesmen in a high wind trying to tie a billowing monster Frankenstein to a Ford Mondeo will live for a long time in the memory - the role of giant inflatables in the art of car salesmanship is something of an unknown.

My seven-year-old daughter - who is far too young to purchase a car of her own - is fascinated, though. No father has had to answer such an unfathomably important question as: "Why has the giant King Kong at the garage got one green tooth, daddy?"

LAST week this column got wrapped up in the Spelling Bee craze that swept the North-East in early 1876. The craze coincided with two fantastic headlines in The Northern Echo which require explanation.

"Crimping at North Shields" concerned a boarding housekeeper accused of "harbouring and secreting" two seamen who had deserted from a Norwegian vessel. They were discovered under his bed.

"Magistrates expressed their determination to put down crimping and fined the defendant £10 or, in default, to be committed to Morpeth Gaol," said the Echo.

"Shebeening in Cleveland - Extraordinary case" concerned Thomas Moore of Skinningrove who was fined £25 for selling beer without a licence. At 9am one Sunday (please note the time and day), police went to Thomas' next door neighbour, removed a brick "and through a hole in the wall observed no less than 20 men seated in the place drinking".

The Echo concluded that this was "a singular case of shebeening on an extensive scale".

Sadly, you don't often find that quality of word in headlines today.

Published: 28/01/2006