LITTLE wonder that folk first turn to the deaths column and not just, as the very old joke goes, to ensure their non-inclusion. There's so much life in there.

Last Friday's paper reported the passing in Richmond, North Yorkshire, of Mr Michael Phillips Drury - "geographer, Philhellene, Church Warden and Fellmonger."

We'd met just once, three years ago when the At Your Service column visited St Agatha's church in Easby, near Richmond. That's where Mike was churchwarden; he'd taught geography at the University of Durham.

That he was a Fellmonger was no great surprise. It's one of two surviving medieval guilds in Richmond - the Grocers' and Mercers' the other - now devoted to charitable work and to helping apprentices, as all the guilds once did.

But a Philhellene? A little knowledge suggests that he may have been a lover of Greece and the Greeks; the Oxford English confirms the dangerous supposition. There's even a distant paragraph from the Darlington and Stockton Times: "Mr Michael Drury will talk on the traditions and history of the Greek Moslems and Turkish Christians...."

There can be many worse things to be called in your classified obit than a Philhellene.

That February afternoon at St Agatha's - Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer, church and service perfect for one another, he'd said - Mike was warm, witty and welcoming.

His name may still not have pealed bells, however, but for what happened next - he wrote to say how greatly he'd enjoyed the subsequent column.

By such rare courtesies are men remembered. The great Philhellene's funeral is at St Agatha's at 12.30pm today.

PHILHELLENISM notwithstanding, the nation is still warned to beware Greeks bearing gifts. Asked to explain, John Briggs in Darlington quotes Laocoon from the account in Virgil's Aeneid of the siege of Troy:

Equo ne credite, Teucri.

Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.

Which being translated means:

Watch out for that horse, Trojans. I wouldn't trust those Greeks as far as I could throw the blooming great thing, not even if the bridle were studded with diamonds and the saddle made of gold.

Cautiously, the phrase became part of the English language. The Troy boy was right all along.

FOR reasons which need little explanation, Her Majesty the Queen may also be said to be something of a Philhellene. She was in Friday's paper, too, a piece extolling her good health and stamina.

"She has undergone surgery on both knees and to remove benign legions from her face," we said, an unfortunate literal clinically seized upon by Maurice Heslop in Billingham.

"I had visions of 300 Romans camping there," he says.

Pete Winstanley, meanwhile, returns whence it came a cutting about North-East airports denying high levels of noxious gases. The accompanying picture was captioned: "A plan lands at Durham Tees Valley Airport."

Ah, says Pete, at last,

TONY Ford in Northallerton wonders if we - and Sky News, among others - could more carefully have reported news of the lifting of the bans on British beef exports - "after years of intensive efforts to eradicate BSE and to establish tough meat monitoring controls." So no more tough beef, then? Perhaps "stringent meat monitoring controls" would have been better, suggests Tony, but then spots another problem.

"You'd be sending your chewy steak back to the kitchen, complaining that it was too stringent..."

HICCUPS? "As a boy I suffered greatly," responds Syd Laycock after last week's column.

"You got a glass of cold water, completely filled your mouth with it and gulped it down in one. It worked 90 per cent of the time." His wife prefers letting a spoonful of sugar dissolve slowly on the tongue.

Steve Warren, now in Durham, recalls that in his "misspent" childhood in West Auckland simply asking the victim to tell you when the next hiccup was coming did the trick. "As they thought about it, they usually found that it never actually happened."

Howard Steel in Low Coniscliffe, near Darlington, who'd drawn attention in last week's column to Sainsbury's "single stripe" hot cross buns - and "cross" wasn't the half of it - now reports that the duty manager at the Darlington store got back to him, blaming a problem at the bakery. No political correctness at all, says a relieved Howard. Merely a hiccup.

WHAT might be termed the "naughty names" department - it started with Ferryhill farmer Alf Hart - is in danger of getting out of hand. You'd be surprised, honest, how many people claim to know someone called Isaac. Mr Ernie Reynolds's contribution is deemed similarly unprintable.

Alan Archbold in Sunderland, who has taken to using "Alf Hart" as a radio pseudonym, also returns to recent notes on stories composed without the letter 'e'.

A 50,000 word epic called Gadsby, written by Edward Vincent Wright, may be found on the Internet. To keep temptation at bay, Mr Wright tied down the 'e' on his keyboard.

"As the vowel 'e' is used five times more often than any other letter," he admits in the introduction, "the story has not been written in any attempt to attain literary merit but due to a somewhat balky nature."

Alan sends a couple of pages - "I didn't think you'd want to read the whole thing."

"Balky" means perverse.

WE reported two weeks ago on the "Durham luxury table lamp" - "full of refinement, classic meticulous craftsmanship and quiet luxury" and only £99.50.

Among the problems was that the shade showed an image of Mapledurham church, 250 miles away in Berkshire. The circular to Durham residents was dated February 28, registrations for the "strictly limited edition" to close on March 28.

Lest that fair city's residents still haven't seen the light, Canterbury-based Decor Art Creations have now produced another mail-shot - with thanks to Alan Price, in Wardley, Gateshead - this one dated March 7, with a closing date of April 4.

The word "wonderful" also appears to have been added to the son et lumiere. Wonderful, indeed.

Musical notes: Dave French in Seaton Carew points out that UKIP's candidate for Hartlepool at the last general election was Ronnie Carroll and not Ronnie Hilton, as last week's column forgetfully supposed.

He also remembers Eddie Calvert, the man with the golden trumpet. "We were talking about him only last night on the bus home from Scunthorpe. I saw him at the old Empire Theatre in Lynn Street, Hartlepool. He was brilliant, and a massive star at the time."

On the trail of No. 1 hits which didn't have the title in the lyrics, a reader whose email has sadly been mislaid adds The Wedding by Julie Rogers - which acts as a reminder.

Anyone know why having a chimney sweep in attendance is meant to be lucky? We may return to the black economy next week.

....and finally back to the deaths column, in which retired RAMC major Chas de-Bues from Middleton-in-Teesdale appeared, doubtless reluctantly, yesterday.

The notice had a semi-classical pay-off line: "I came, I enjoyed, I'm off. Cheers!"

That'll do nicely.