THE "green ink brigade" is well-known to editors. It consists of people who send in copies of the paper, covered in scribblings and rantings. Every mistake, every contentious point, is ringed or underlined, more often than not in green ink.
Their letters go on for page after page in a tidal wave of green bile.
I once had a letter from a green ink regular, signed Paul the Apostle, telling me I was "the spawn of the horned devil and a wicked whore from hell".
I am, in fact, the spawn of an electrician and a postlady from Middlesbrough and I've thus far kept Paul the Apostle's letter from them for fear of causing a domestic incident.
Don't ask me why these people choose green ink. They just do. But last week, in a refreshing change, I received a page with pink ink scrawled all over it. Perhaps the green ink has begun to run dry.
It was a column from the Sun, written by legendary former editor Kelvin MacKenzie. There was an angry pink ring around MacKenzie's chubby face, with a strident pink line leading to a pink-ringed paragraph describing Gordon Brown as someone who "wants to take your money and distribute it to the skint and the dim of the north".
A poisonous pink arrow led to an incandescent pink scrawl demanding to know: "Who do these people think they are?!!"
It is, of course, just a cliché trotted out by London-based wind-up merchants who know no better, and we really shouldn't rise to the bait.
I was more concerned about another part of MacKenzie's column about Paul McCartney's separation from Heather Mills who, it should be pointed out, hails from the north but is a very long way indeed from being dim or skint.
MacKenzie warned that Sir Paul's failure to sign a pre-nuptial agreement would "cost him an arm... and a leg".
It's not that it's in bad taste. It's just that it's such a tired old joke that's been doing the rounds for ages. I'm so appalled, I'm sending him a letter - in green ink: "Dear Kelvin, you are the spawn of the horned devil and..."
THE South Mowbray Group of WIs - Sowerby, Sessay, Dalton, Carlton Miniott, Kirby Knowle with Upsall, Felixkirk with Sutton, Swaleside, Kilburn and Oldstead, and Borrowby - celebrated their 60th anniversary last week.
They kindly asked me to join them as after-dinner speaker at the Golden Fleece Hotel in Thirsk and it is my duty to report that we were there under false pretences. It wasn't the 60th anniversary at all. Last-minute research by chairman Marian Codling recorded that the group had, in fact, been around for 70 years at least.
The fading minutes she'd unearthed also revealed that previous speakers included What's My Line panellist Lady Isobel Barnet and BBC war correspondent Godfrey Talbot. The intrepid Mr Talbot had, apparently, complained that his room at the Golden Fleece was too cold, though that would surely never be the case now.
There's also a note of how Thirsk's Lambert Memorial Hospital made a wartime appeal for eggs. More than 200 were swiftly mustered in a typically cracking effort by the WI.
Sixty years. Seventy years. Who cares? Happy anniversary ladies.
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