Fell guy

I do not like thee Doctor Fell

The reason why, I cannot tell.

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not like thee Doctor Fell.

THE nursery rhyme may be familiar. Childhood memory suggests that there was also a Dr Fell’s cough mixture – miraculous stuff, though not even that panacea may have helped poor Michael Clarke.

Mr Clarke captained Australia in last week’s fifth and final test match, the ultimate humiliation, against England.

Even before it, suggested The Times, he was Australian cricket’s Dr Fell. No one liked him, they didn’t know why. What few may also know is that the Fell guy actually existed.

He was a 17th Century dean of Christ Church, Oxford – later Oxford’s bishop – who felt constrained to expel the young Tom Brown after Brown (it is said) “committed some mischief”.

Brown studied, appealed, was granted a second chance if accurately he could translate a Latin epigram by Martial – a gentleman, incidentally, who is first credited with the irrefutable advice to live for today.

The lines, translated, read: “I do not like you Sabidius. I can’t say why, all I can say is I don’t like you.”

Wrong righted, Fell allowed the appeal – which didn’t stop Brown adapting his lines to torment his mentor. They appeared in Robert Graves’s “Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes” and, from 1926, in the definitive Mother Goose collection.

Bernard Farrell, an Irish author who won the Rooney Prize for Literature –the mind rather boggles at that one – even wrote an acclaimed 1979 play called I Do Not Like Thee Dr Fell.

The name has also been used as a pseudonym for Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic killer.

Poor Michael Clarke could have one consolation. After his side’s abject display, it may be blatantly obvious why no one likes him after all.

KEITH Archer, a most agreeable chap who for 25 years was licensee of the Station at Hurworth, near Darlington, finally retired and moved along the road to The Wayside. He called the house Fellby.

THE Ashes victory, of course, has elicited all the usual jokes – you know, like what you call an Australian with a bottle of champagne in his hand. A waiter.

That’s one’s so well-travelled, it was in both the Daily Star and the Guardian.

There’s the gag about what the Melbourne Cricket Ground spectator missed when he went to the loo – the Australian first innings – and the one about the definition of optimism.

An Australian going out to bat wearing sunscreen.

Even the all-purpose sporting joke about what you get by crossing the Australian/Chelsea/Newcastle Falcons team and an Oxo cube – a laughing stock – has jingoistically waved about.

Brenda Boyd in Newcastle sends the line about the bloke who walks into a knocking shop, announces that he’s a bit kinky and asks how much for total humiliation.

The madam says £60. “Wow,” says the guy, “what do I get for that?”

“A baggy green cap and an Australian shirt,” she replies.

FROM the Australian Daily Telegraph, some time in November, Chris Willsden sends a list of ten reasons why the Poms have no chance. Number eight: “This is England we’re talking about. Think every cricket tour of Australia since 1986-87.

They always arrive talking themselves up, vowing they won’t wilt under the heat and pressure and scrutiny.

They will.”

FROM the epigrammatical to the simply grammatical, and back to well-trodden territory.

At a restaurant in Keswick – “choose from our tab’le d’hote menu” – Paul Dobson quotes the best (“or worst”) example of the aberrant apostrophe that he’s seen. They’re furthered by John Heslop and Ian Forsyth, both in Durham, and by Chris Orton in Ferryhill.

John spots, and photographs, a double whammy on a pizza shop in Durham city centre; Ian draws attention to a Durham County Council planning application – “lobby’s and WC’s” – among the classifieds.

“If the council’s excuse is that that’s how the applicant spelled it, it should be grounds for rejecting the application out of hand,” he insists.

Chris was watching the ITV programme Children’s Hospital at Christmas, in which a young patient’s mum was interviewed. Up came the caption: “Jacks’s mother,”

it said.

If it all seems a bit familiar, then Paul Dobson – in Bishop Auckland – returns via an overheard conversation to a more recent pre-occupation.

“I’m sorry,” said one of them, “I should have pre-warned you about that.”

HERSELF an occasional adventurer down Apostrophe Avenue, Wendy Acres in Darlington ends Christmas with a recollection of Scrooge’s observation that anyone who went around with Merry Christmas on their lips should be boiled with their own pudding and with a sprig of holly through the heart.

Now she understands. “I felt exactly the same about anyone I heard singing Dreaming of a White Christmas,” she says.

NO doubt it was the White Christmas which, cause and effect, set David Walsh thinking about cabin fever.

He knew the phrase from working on Teesside building sites in the 1970s, was pleased to see it given a certain respectability in several newspaper reports over the break.

“Even the sainted Janet Street Porter mentioned it in a Boxing Day column in the Independent on Sunday, thus proving that nothing (in English phraseology) is too good for the workers.”

But where, specifically, does cabin fever originate? The column guessed that it might be nautical – Lord Jim, or something. David – from Skelton in east Cleveland – disagreed.

“It’s the old convention that your wage was safe in bad weather so long as you were on site and in your cabin.

Go home and you lost the lot.

“Cabin fever came from playing the same card games, listening to the same radio programmes, looking at the same crosswords and generally getting fed up of your companions, regardless of their charms.”

The phrase is well known – Homer and Mr Burns use it in The Simpsons after becoming trapped in a hut after an avalanche – though etymologically uncertain.

Far less obvious, however, is a “guvvy job”, another building site expression meaning to earn money on the side. A foreigner, as they say.

A government job, presumably, would be the exact opposite. So who can unravel the guv affair?

… and finally, Ian Cross in East Harsley, near Northallerton, reckons the column’s joke about the 56-inch, £120 television with no volume control – “At that price you can’t turn it down”

– the best he heard in 2009.

Last year’s finest, he supposes, concerned the talking collie he met while walking through the North Yorkshire countryside.

They chatted away for half an hour before Ian wondered if the dog could count, as well. “How many sheep in that field?” he asked.

“Forty,” said the collie, quick as a flash.

“Wrong,” said Ian, “there are only 38.”

“I know,” said the collie, “I rounded them up.”