Just joking...

THE hope amid the encircling gloom is that today’s column might be faintly amusing – so first to Joe King, comedian.

It is not, of course, his real name.

Really he’s Joe Lamb but that doesn’t have the same mutton-dressed potential.

You must be Joe Lamb… Joe King’s been fondly familiar for many years in the Bishop Auckland area and frequently far beyond. “Oh aye, Joe,” they recall in Cockton Hill club as we await his off-stage arrival last Friday evening, “there’s many a time I’ve seen him tell jokes in his underpants.”

Part of the act, apparently.

Now 85, he’s recently moved into Howlish Hall care home at Coundon.

His grandson, who drove him across to the club, had had to cancel his papers.

“I told the newsagent to stop the papers for Joe Lamb,” he recalled.

“He didn’t know who I was talking about. Finally I twigged and mentioned Joe King.”

Many years ago Joe had managed a Birmingham strip club run by a chap known as Knacker and with a 14-bed dormitory upstairs. “Thirteen for the girls and one for me. Canny job” he said.

But why Knacker? “Because he went around knacking people,” said Joe.

At the age of 19 he was told by a doctor that he’d never go bald and would live to be 100. Both predictions so far hold true. His memory’s good, too, as befits a man who can still tell the only known joke about that Welsh place with the very long name.

I forget the gag, but the punchline’s Burger King.

Three years ago he married a 48- year-old Thai he met in a massage parlour. She can’t get a visa, her photograph still affectionately in his wallet.

The official reason for the meeting was that, characteristically generous, he’d wanted to hand over a DVD of the classic Freddie Frinton sketch Dinner for One, about which the John North column got excited two years ago and which inexplicably remains a New Year’s Eve favourite on every German television channel.

He brought it wrapped in the original newsprint. Who said it’s tomorrow’s fish and chips?

“I try to keep cheerful, it’s best to,”

said Joe King and that may be a watchword for us all.

IN order to lend the column some gravitas, we next hear from the Reverend Dr Mel Gray in Chilton.

Mel has a joke, too, this one about Barack Obama – it could be anyone – visiting a Glasgow hospital. None of the patients has obvious signs of illness or injury.

He greets one, the response curious: Fair fa your honest, sonsie face Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race….

Confused, the president grins, moves on and talks to someone else.

The response is similar: Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie O what a panic’s in thy breastie….

So it goes on. Finally, Obama turns to the accompanying doctor and asks if he’s in a psychiatric ward.

“No,” says the doc, “this is the serious Burns unit.”

…and from Ivor Wade in Darlington, the story of two kids on stretchers outside the operating theatre.

Asked what he’s in for, the second kid says he’s having his tonsils out and is a bit nervous.

“Oh that’s nothing,” says the first.

“I had that done when I was four.

They put you to sleep and when you wake up you get lots of jelly and ice cream. It’s a breeze.”

Asked in turn, the first kid replies that he’s in for a circumcision.

“Whoa,” says the second.

“I had that done when I was born. Couldn’t walk for a year.”

LAST week’s column was sweet-toothed, particularly in recalling Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, (see below). Ian Andrew, a Methodist local preacher from Lanchester in north Durham, even remembers giving a sermon based on the Five Boys wrapper – “our daughter had given us a print of it.”

Though he doesn’t reveal the wording, that it was an “immediate post-Easter sermon” may be context enough.

John Maughan in Wolsingham always associates Five Boys – and this may be no laughing matter at all – with twice-yearly childhood visits to Mr Clay’s dental surgery in Bishop Auckland.

“Mr Clay wasn’t a great lover of local anaesthetic when drilling decay out of my teeth. If I remember rightly, it was my first experience of real pain, but when the torture was over he would give me a bar of Five Boys.

“I suppose it was some sort of peace offering.

I remember looking at the wrapper and thinking I must be the tearful one on the left.”

Butter sweet, or what?

We’d also recalled ten confectionery advertising slogans and invited readers to name the products. Despite the tempting prize – four ounces of sweeties, was it not – there were just three entries, all pretty much correct and all from Gadfly Irregulars.

No quarter spared, Jon Smith wins.

􀁧 The answers were: Topic (a hazel nut in every bite), Treets (melts in your mouth, not in your hand), Smarties (Buy some for Lulu), Cadbury’s Fudge (Just enough to give the kids a treat), Cadbury’s Flake (Tastes like chocolate never tasted before), Murray Mints (Too good to hurry), Terry’s All Gold (See the face you love light up), Opal Fruits (Made to make your mouth water), Yorkie (Not for girls), Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (One chunk leads to another.) MORE grist to the mill, Ashley Sutherland in Sunderland reports that his local supermarket is now advertising “adult cereals”.

Perhaps, he supposes, they’re only to be eaten after the nine o’clock watershed.

AS it does through footpaths and the like, that pesky little blighter the horsetail keeps on pushing its head above ground hereabouts.

The last reference was on December 1. A member of the Stockton Brethren, a convivial group whom I’d addressed a few days earlier, suggested that the answer was ammonium sulphamate. Resistance, like the weed, withered in its path.

There’s now a helpful email from Lynn Jopling, an adviser to the Scottish Golf Environment Group at St Andrews, whose father sent her the column.

The EU banned ammonium sulphamate in 2008, she says. The plant, adds Lynn, is pernicious and persistent.

Shallow occasional weeding is not effective and may make matters worse.

Weed killers containing glyphosate can be applied in late summer when growth is strong – “before using, bruise the shoots with a rake to ensure effective penetration.”

In botanical terms, this is known as giving it a good howking.

PONDERING the etymology of the “guvvy job” – those little sidelines done on work equipment and in work time – recent columns have supposed the North- East’s railway works to be a centre of guvviement. Peter Sotheran in Redcar provides the campanological connection.

An essential part of the mechanism of many church bells, says Peter, is a length of stiff wood – ash usually preferred – about 3ins across and a yard long.

For many years, he adds, ash shunting poles proved ideal for the needs of ringers in the diocese of Durham anxious to get to know the ropes. They came, of course, from Shildon wagon works.

…so finally, from Brenda Boyd, in Newcastle, the story about the Christian and the Hindu making toast.

Suddenly the Christian exclaims: “Look there’s an image of Jesus in my margarine.”

“Gosh,” says the Hindu, “I can’t believe it’s not Buddha.”