A direct line to heaven?

IS nothing sacred? Beneath the neat header “The end of the line”, David Kelly in Mickleton, Teesdale, sends this rather surprising example of letting it all hang out.

The churchyard is St Mary’s, in Arkengarthdale, North Yorkshire – just down the road from the celebrated CB Hotel – the person behind the clothes show (prop: unknown) is anyone’s guess.

David’s been having a spin round the internet, come up with a few biblical quotations from Leviticus – all sorts of funny things in Leviticus – and another from the Book of Numbers: “And ye shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and ye shall be clean, and afterward ye shall come into the camp.”

He could also have been thinking, of course, of the line from the Messiah (and from the Apocrypha) about taking off the mortal clothing and putting on the immortal, though it says nothing about where the mortal togs might be left.

Other suggestions, not least from the Rev Dr Mel Gray, most welcome.

THE Church Times’ own caption competition two weeks ago showed a photograph of Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, standing alone by the latest Popemobile.

Among the entries were two from David Wilborne, a former Archbishop’s chaplain and Vicar of Helmsley and now himself a bishop in Wales.

Since one contained the word “buggered” – episcopal evidence of that term’s redemption? – we shall have to crib the second.

“Hmmm. Rowan (Williams) gets to have tea with the Pope, and I have to wait for the AA man.”

THIS week’s Church Times carries a sit vac for a lecturer in liturgy at Cuddesdon College, near Oxford, among the not-unexpected requirements that applicants should be priests. There’s also a statutory rider under Regulation 7(2)a of the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Act of 2003. The post holder must also be a Christian.

How many does that disqualify, then?

CLEARLY the recent fascination with place names knows no frontiers: Chris Willsden, former landlord of the Bay Horse in Hurworth, near Darlington, chips in from Texas, where now he lives.

Chiefly his examples are Texan.

You’d have to go to West Virginia to find Big Ugly.

Utopia’s quite close to where he lives though misnamed, says Chris, because there’s a gunsmith and a blacksmith but no bar. Whether or not it’s close to perfection, Acme is also nearby. Paradise, it will be recalled, is part of Witton Park.

Texas is also home to Comfort – southern Comfort, presumably – Raisin, Oatmeal, Rice and Noodle.

There’s Cut and Shoot, Point Blank, Gun Barrel and Gunsight.

There’s Bigfoot and there’s Muleshoes, Needmore and Notrees, there’s Best, Bangs, Impact and – “just for you,” says Chris – there’s even Jot ’em Down.

The Lone Star state also has a place named Nameless. It should be twinned with No Place, County Durham, forthwith.

ALL this began with Worlds End, that less-than-cataclysmic little appendage to Sowerby, Thirsk, best known for its grade II-listed packhorse bridge. A wholly unexpected angle, Steve Schroeter refers us to a piece headed “Three trout, three lives” that he wrote for Trout and Salmon magazine earlier this year.

In Steve’s affectionate narrative it became the humpty-backed bridge, a plaque recording that it’s been there since 1672. “How many snotty noses and sweethearts have gawped over that low parapet,” he wonders.

It’s the Cod Beck, as we noted, and trout remain in there. Steve writes well, the sort of riparian rapture that consumed old Ratty in the Wind in the Willows.

People, he wrote, will persist in asking the great non-question about whether anything was caught. “It absolutely doesn’t matter. What does matter, what always mattered, is how did the light shine on the water?

Did the curlew call? Did the lapwing flash white in the sun?”

The spawning barbel have gone, the tens of thousands of lamprey that spawned on the gravels in the spring have gone. Trout, happily, still populate Cod Beck, measured up to 15in against the rod. Steve, no less happily, returns them whence they came.

KEN Orton in Ferryhill Station sends photographs of all that remains of Linger and Die, once a railwaymen’s settlement near Chilton but now no more than grazing for horses. No evidence of human habitation, says Ken.

Wendy Acres in Darlington recalls both Loggerheads and New Invention, which we mentioned in the spring, and also the Aberdeenshire village of Tough.

On the wall outside, insists Wendy, it really does say “Tough School”, though no doubt they’re soft as clarts, really.

THEN blow me if there’s not a call yesterday morning from Lionel Taylor in Spain, recalling the time when Linger and Die seemed likely to live up to its name.

It was the fearful winter of 1947, Lionel, his siblings and their mother trapped in the house beneath 8ft snow drifts – “things were getting pretty desperate, I can tell you,” he recalls.

Ferryhill had a railway station back then. Tommy Tinkler, the station master, allowed members of the Taylor, Johnson and Vickerstaff families to yomp down the main line to bring relief to Linger and Die. “I can still remember,” says Lionel, now 76, “how very pleased we were to see them.”

His father had died in 1939, his mother worked for the Co-op at Ferryhill Station, sent round the doors to collect coppers from those who believed the maxim about better slate than never.

Lionel recalls riding on a railway bogey to the end of the road that led to the school, acting as look-out when the menfolk played illegal card games for money, working on Sowerby’s farm across the fields.

When he was 14, however, his mother decided that she wanted no more of her family to work down the pit and moved them south. Lionel became a BOAC messenger at Heathrow, rose to own his shipping and forwarding company, moved to Spain 16 years ago.

“It’s 24 degrees and not a cloud in the sky,” he reports. “I’m wearing shorts and putting out some bulbs.”

His villa will be getting a new decoration.

“I’m framing that report and picture of Linger and Die. Who’d have thought it? It really is a small world.”

WITH much the same roots, last week’s column also recalled legendary Leasingthorne racehorse trainer Arthur Stephenson, the man who liked to observe that little fish were sweet.

The aphorism’s most famous outing, says Martin Birtle, came when The Thinker – Stephenson trained – won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March 1987. Stivvie was at Hexham; he had more runners there.

The Gold Cup started 81 minutes late because of snow storms. Stivvie had called racing journalist Walter Glenn only that morning to ask him to saddle The Thinker in his absence.

The horse was ridden by Ridley Lamb, who died with a colleague in July 1994 after the car in which they were travelling plunged into the harbour at Seahouses.

Chris Grant, Denys Smith’s stable jockey, rode Cybrandian, the second horse. “It was a Bishop Auckland glory day at Cheltenham,” said the Echo’s front page story.

Meanwhile back at Hexham, Arthur had just one winner from six attempts, in the £3,000 Racing Post Handicap Chase. If all that stuff about minnows and things really was his thought for the day, it never made the Echo. The horse was called Succeeded. Stivvie did.

…and finally, the Rev Dr Mel Gray (aforesaid) sends the relatively true story of Eamon Casey, an Irish bishop who fled to the Philippines when the papers revealed that he had a son. The then Archbishop of Manila was Cardinal Sin, whom Casey sought out as his confessor. The opening line is perhaps apocryphal: “Forgive me Sin, for I have fathered.”

After the graveyard shift, the column returns in a fortnight.