MAYBE it’s a case of there being nothing new under the sun, perhaps of it all coming out in the wash, but there’s a quite splendid follow-up to the column a fortnight back.

Stringing a line, we carried a photograph of clothes hanging out to dry between the graves of St Mary’s churchyard in Arkengarthdale, North Yorkshire.

Nothing sacred? Tell that to Pat Woodward.

Pat, a retired Durham Cathedral land agent and former Battle of Britain pilot, has a print of what he believes to be an early 19th Century engraving of washing put to dry between the nave and north transept of that great Norman cathedral.

“It’s the local washerwoman. I’ve no doubt it’s authentic,” he says.

“There was a great deal of neglect of the cathedral in the 19th Century, some very unusual practices.”

There’s even talk of stabling horses around the Nine Altars. “I think,”

adds Pat, perhaps mercifully, “that that was during the Civil War.”

WE hear, incidentally, that the Durham Cathedral verger who answers to Big Trev – 6ft 6in tall and built, as they say, commensurately – is going round telling the ecclesiastical joke about the difference between a terrorist and an organist.

You know, you can negotiate with a terrorist. If this fails to have them rolling in the aisles, or even the transept, it may be because it was published hereabouts just three weeks ago – and was about 50 years old even then.

WITH apologies for its late arrival, a 65th birthday card arrives from Mr Eric Smallwood in Middlesbrough.

Whilst the intention is laudable, the card is premature. On the day that it arrived there were exactly 11 more months and ten more days to official retirement, recalling a song much loved by the late Bill Oliver, our south-west Durham photographer in the 60s and 70s.

Recorded by Billy Cotton and his Band – remember Wakey Wakey? – it immediately sets the scene:

I’m in the lock-up 20 days, just 20 days ago
I met the judge, the kind old judge, who was feeling fine and so
He gave me just a year in jail
A sensible sort of gink
All on account of a gallon of beer that I thought I could drink.

It’s the chorus that’s memorable, however:

In 11 more months and ten more days
I’ll be out of the calaboose,
In 11 more months and ten more days
They’re going to turn me loose.

In 11 more months and rather fewer days, those cards will be very welcome. Ever ahead of the game, Eric may consider his gratefully received already.

ONE singer one song, we are also intrigued to hear that Robin Williamson – founder member of the Incredible String Band and described as “the godfather of psychedelic folk” – is to appear on November 12, at St Mary’s Hall, in Barnard Castle.

“He loves the area and even sang a song called Lord Barnard on his last album,” reports the Teesdale Mercury.

Lord Barnard, now 87, is master of much that he surveys thereabouts though not (so far as reasonably may be ascertained) a huge fan of psychedelic folk music.

The song, it transpires, is a very old one – probably 17th Century – its one-flew-over-the-cuckold-nest theme more timeless yet.

Usually its known as Mattie Groves, sung memorably by Ms Joan Baez, though Wikipedia acknowledges Lord Barnard, among others like Little Musgrave and Lord Barnett, as alternative titles.

In short, his lordship returns unexpectedly from a shooting trip to find his lady wife in bed with this Groves/Musgrave chap, orders him to get dressed on the grounds that he wouldn’t kill a naked man and then runs him through, anyway.

It may be that Lord Barnard isn’t invited a week on Friday. If he is, it may be prudent to plead a prior engagement.

IN time for Hallowe’en, a couple of readers kindly sent links to a BBC Radio 4 programme called Ghost Trains of Old England, broadcast last week.

No less appropriately, it was about those railway routes where the most skeletal service applies.

There’s the long-famous run, once a week and in only one direction, between Stockport and Stalybridge, a yet more weird business at Ealing Broadway and, oddest of all, the goings- on (or absence of them) at New Haven Marine.

“Letting the service decline to the point of imbecility is easy and cheap,” said Ian Merchant, the presenter.

Much closer to home there’s Teesside Airport, now officially the least-used station in the country after just 44 passengers joined or alighted in 2008. That there’s only one stopping train a week in each direction – on Saturdays – and that it took the travellers 45 minutes to find a way past the security fencing and onto the airport probably doesn’t help.

Merchant went with Alex Nelson, the entrepreneurial “station master”

at Chester-le-Street, who last year organised a mass visitation – 26 of them, anyway – in an attempt to boost the station’s user figures.

“I imagine the station would be quite well used if there were a halfhourly service,” said Alex, bravely.

Teesside Airport station, they discovered, even has a working telephone box and, helpfully, gave its number. 01325-335446. I rang it on Monday morning. “Invalid,” said the screen. Perhaps they weren’t expecting a train.

AGAIN acknowledging the Over 60s club, Peter Chapman sends information on a proposed new book called Bus Pass Britain, inviting 250-word essays on “the most scenic, historical or quirky bus journeys”.

A slight problem is that, for reasons of indolence and not age, I don’t have a bus pass. Were things different, the dawning glory of the 5.35am Arriva service from Darlington to Hawes would undoubtedly be proposed – though probably not in winter.

Like everything else these days, the bus pass book comes with terms and conditions. “This competition is open to anyone of any age,” it says.

… and finally we are grateful to Geoff Howe, secretary of Darlington Scrabble Club, for some splendid anagrams dreamed up by his fellow wordsmiths.

“Seen Alive? Sorry pal” is an anagram of Elvis Aaron Presley, “an adored amigo” of Diego Maradona, “angel of the reclining” of Florence Nightingale and “He’s grown large ‘n’ crazed” of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Particularly, however, we are taken by a re-ordering of what may be Shakespeare’s most famous lines:

To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…”

Scrabbled a bit, it becomes:

In one of the Bard’s best thoughts of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

Life, happily, remains pretty good.

Old, old story, the column returns next week.