HITHER and slither, we spent Christmas on the skids. Tow Law was predictably snowbound – it may be Easter before again they see grass up there – other parts more surprisingly so.

Whatever happened to road salt?

Everywhere its absence is bemoaned, grit expectations lamentably unrealised.

Even within 100 yards of Darlington town centre, well-trod pavements remain treacherously untreated.

The fracture clinic may just as greatly be rushed off its feet.

Among many festive forays, it was only on a minor road near Ravensworth – between Richmond and the A66 – that we stumbled upon this previously unencountered road sign, top right.

A Rotary Club meeting, perhaps?

Some newly discovered molecular structure? A sky divers’ convention overhead?

The single word “Ice” indicated its true purpose, and still the ice age endures.

Steady as she goes, it’s still very good to be back.

DOUBTLESS noble, and doubtless well-intentioned, the Echo’s resolution to avoid silly little errors failed to survive New Year’s Day.

The feature on Arthur Puckrin, the superfit 71-year-old Middlesbrough barrister who in December became quad-ironman world champion, also spoke of his prowess at the “Decca ironman” discipline.

“Ironman” is a recognised athletics event, a quad-ironman simply four of them on successive days. Ten is thus a deca-ironman. Decca was the music company which on New Year’s Day 1962 infamously turned down a group called The Beatles. It was a record for Arthur, even so.

WE all make them, of course, not least the Comet store in Darlington where cameracarrying Susan Jaleel came across the sign at the top of this column, distinctly non-U.

John Barr, also in Darlington, a poster for Christmas decorations.

“Reeths, £5.”

John Heslop’s family attended a Christmas concert in London, staged by The Guardian – they of the literal thinking – and featuring many of its staff. John counts at least three mistakes in the programme and song sheet. The line from O Come All Ye Faithful about “Gory to God” may be the most unfortunate.

ON the back of Mr Joe McElderry’s X Factor extravaganza, the column on December 16 recalled a very much earlier and more innocent talent contest – Have a Go Joe, presented by Mr Wilfred Pickles on what was then the North Home Service. Up to 20 million tuned in.

Joe-as-you-please, it not only stirred a number of memories but again underlined the most notoriously transmuted word in the English language.

Have a Go toured Britain, 1,500 shows and never – it was said – the same venue twice. “I’m sure they did two in Gunnerside,” insists Tom Peacock from High Coniscliffe, near Darlington. Gunnerside’s a small village in Swaledale.

Perhaps even then it was a BBC repeat.

Harry Mead recalls spending Christmas in the early Fifties with his parents’ friends near Leeds, the host the chief metallurgist of the Yorkshire Copper Company and a man so highly regarded that he even received a card from Wilfred and Mabel Pickles.

It stood, centre stage, on the mantelpiece.

“We looked at it,” says Harry, “with something approaching awe.”

The man who may most greatly know his Pickles onions, however, is that invaluable stage and film historian John Foster from Langley Park, near Durham.

WILFRED Pickles was a Halifax lad. “They put a plaque on the house where he was born,” says John. “It said ‘Gas main, 16ft’.”

He’d starred in pantomime in Bradford in 1947 – John still has the programme, a young June Whitfield also appearing – and in Leeds the following year. It was in a play called The Gay Dog, however, that he really came into his own.

The Gay Dog. Imagine that 60 years later. The RSPCA would be barking.

The play, at any rate, was written by North-East man Joseph Colton, who lived in Esh Village and taught at nearby Bearpark, a couple of miles west of Durham.

His parents were Irish, he himself supposed rather eccentric – perhaps because he’d attend the first night of plays wearing one black shoe and one brown one. Another time, says John, he’d invited two neighbours to be his guests at Sunderland Empire but when the time came to pay had only school chalk in his pocket.

During the war, adds John, Colton lived in Newcastle but visited his parents each week. “A sister at the local convent was convinced he was a Russian spy and had to be persuaded not to shop him to the authorities.”

Originally called A Dog for Delmont and written in Durham dialect, the play was first performed by Sunderland Drama Company in 1948 but was adapted with a Yorkshire accent to appeal more greatly, it was said, to Southerners.

Clearly it worked. At the Piccadilly Theatre it ran to 276 performances, Pickles starring as the greyhound loving Jim Gay and Joan Hickson – very much later to be Miss Marple – among the supporting cast.

When Pickles left, north country comedian Albert Burdon – belonged South Shields, like Joe McElderry – took on the lead role. In 1954, at Preston, Leonard Rossiter made his stage debut in The Gay Dog, which also became a film.

Widely knowledgeable – and with a piece on Burdon in the forthcoming volume of the superb Durham Biographies series – John’s nonetheless mistaken to suppose that the Echo will hold abundant archive material on either Colton or Burdon.

There’s not so much as a ticket stub.

If only on the grounds that every Gay Dog has its day, more memories would greatly be welcomed.

WE’D also been playing around with newspaper headline variations on the “Supercallyfragilistic”

theme. The present cricket series in South Africa much lends itself to the game, as the Mirror found irresistible and Paul Wilkinson in North Yorkshire points out. The South Africans’ top batsman just now is Jacques Kallis. Readers may doubtless work the rest out for themselves.

THE Christmas Gadfly echoed the present absurdity of fashionable terms such as prebooking, or even pre-ordering. You can book after the event? Statuesque former Fleet Street editor Janet Street Porter essays a pretext dafter yet. She who now claims North Yorkshire as her second home wrote in a national Sunday paper about Question Time panellists “pre-memorising”

quotes. How anything may be post-memorised truly boggles the mind.

That column’s eye was also caught by the car registration TOR1S, spotted in the former colliery village of Brandon – not hitherto supposed a Conservative party redoubt. It belongs, it transpires, to Durham midwife Victoria Young – Tori to her friends. We asked Geoff, her husband, if it might also reflect her political allegiance. “I’ve no idea,” he insists.

...and finally, a festive edition of the Guardian reports that an organic farm near Richmond, North Yorkshire, was advertising a sack of seed potatoes as the perfect present – “a delightful surprise from Santa Claus for any child on Christmas morning and the very filling of the stocking.”

Baz Mundy in Coundon recalls a childhood Christmas when he received a torch with different animals to go over the lens and, the big one, a Wild West garrison.

Unable to find any toy cowboys, the young Baz burst into tears and was asked what the matter might be.

“Never mind,” said his dad, “it’s the fort that counts.”