Catholic tasters

DID you see that smashing little letter at the foot of Hear All Sides on Friday?

Headed “Shared misery”, it noted that Stockton, California, had for the second year running been named by Forbes Magazine as the most miserable city in the United States.

How sad is that?

“Sounds like a perfect candidate for twinning,” wrote D Reed, from Eaglescliffe – itself in the breastbeating Borough of Stockton.

It was all rather surprising. Stockton, California, has an annual asparagus festival, after all. However greatly it might deepen the depression, further digging seemed appropriate.

How did the esteemed Forbes Magazine reach its conclusions? What’s it like in Gloom Town, California? Is it really the poor citizens’ fault that formerly the place was known as Fat City, and as Mudville?

On the riverside, like its Teesside namesake, Stockton is a city of getting on 300,000 people – very much bigger than the North-East borough that also embraces Thornaby, Billingham and one or two smaller places (such as Eaglescliffe).

It’s the home of the University of the Pacific, the Bob Hope Theatre, the Haggin Museum and of an awful lot of eco-friendly wind turbines.

It also has seven sister cities across the world, though none of them is in England. So why so lamentably lugubrious?

Forbes surveyed the 240 largest metropolitan areas in the US, minimum population 240,000. Its ten key factors included unemployment, violent crime, commuting time – at least it’s only five minutes from Thornaby to Middlesbrough by train – and taxation. In all America, only New Yorkers pay more tax.

The survey also took into account the weather – temperature, precipitation, humidity – and performances by the local professional sports clubs.

Though they haven’t the Boro to weep and to worry about, the message is clear. Asparagus festival notwithstanding, the other man’s grass may not be so much greener after all.

MONDAY’S paper reported, and Saturday’s At Your Service column will echo, the epochal events at St James the Great church in Darlington which shortly will lead to mass secessions from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.

Much is mystifying, ecclesiastically arcane. What to the layman may be most puzzling of all is that Father Keith Newton, the former Anglican bishop who now leads the seceding groups, is known as the Ordinary when clearly it’s the last thing on earth that he is.

Fr Newton will be an ex-officio member of the Bishops Council. If canon law allowed married bishops, he’d again be a bishop already.

Himself extraordinary, he is also the owner of an extra-ordinary hat – a runcible hat, as Edward Lear observed.

The size of a man’s hat, of course, is not necessarily a measure of his importance and may also be etymologically irrelevant.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers 17 definitions, umpteen sub-definitions and probably 2,000 words to explain “ordinary”. It will take better minds than this one to embrace the extremes.

The Queen, for example, is the Ordinary of Westminster Abbey where neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Dean has higher authority.

Like Fr Newton, no Ordinary Joe at all.

DOUBTLESS it’s just one of the English language’s many apparent contradictions, as a timely email from Ivor Wade in Darlington observes.

“How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

“How come that when the stars are out they’re visible, but when the lights are out they’re invisible? How can you fill in a form by filling it out?

How come you have noses that run and feet that smell?”

It’s all very confusing but, happily, we wouldn’t be without it.

THE discerning will have observed the term “Roman Catholic” and not just “Catholic”.TheReverendDrAlanPowers, a former superintendent Methodist minister in Crook and now retired to Northallerton, had a letter about this in the paper a few months back.

Though the Romans like to talk just of the “Holy Catholic church”, by which they generally mean themselves, Dr Powers argued, and Chambers confirms, that catholic means universal – “embracing the whole body of Christians”.

Dr Powers is a good chap. He may nevertheless be surprised to learn that we are wholly in agreement.

Short, back and side-issues

TALKING about barbers, demonic and otherwise, last week’s column invited reports of some of the more imaginatively named hairdressers.

Colin Mills spotted a Black Sheep Men’s Hairdresser in Manchester while, closer to home, Pete Sixsmith notes that in Houghton-le-Spring there’s a place – “simple and effective” – called Houghton Cuts.

Locals will understand. It’s from the Blackhall Wok school of nomenclature.

Not quite a word from our tonsor, but Joan Munro in Sunderland spotted in South Shields a bridal hire business called Aisle Altar Hymn.

Others welcome.

ALL these short, back and sideissues reminded Tony Stainthorpe in Durham of his three months initial police training – “during which time I must have had nearly ten haircuts”.

The biggest laugh, he recalls, came when Jimmy – a fellow recruit – was ordered to get his hair cut and being predictably skint got one of the lads to do it.

“In those days there was none of the mirror behind the head to see the finished product. It had more steps in it than the climb to Whitby Abbey.”

Next morning, the drill sergeant affected apoplexy. Young Stainthorpe began laughing and for his merriment was ordered to get his own hair cut, too. “I’m sure,” he says, “that the drill sergeant was in league with the centre hairdresser.”

ONE of last week’s hairdressers was from Cockfield – Cockfield in County Durham, as we made clear, and thus not to be confused with the Sussex village of Cuckfield, on the former London to Brighton turnpike, from which Shirley Bond hails.

Cuckfield’s also known for its somewhat unusual system of electing a mayor, by which unlimited votes can be bought for a penny apiece.

Shirley’s now in Yarm, another part of the borough of Stockton, which doesn’t seem miserable at all. Shortly before Remembrance Day 2008, she recalls, the Echo devoted a full page to her book on Cuckfield’s war heroes, family histories originating from names on the village memorial.

“Each man should be more than just a name and should never be forgotten,” she said. Kevin Richardson, down the road at Evenwood, has written a similar book.

Shirley’s book is still available and she also give talks on family history – she can be contacted at sj.bond@onyxnet.co.uk.

…and finally, Doug Porthouse in Ferryhill spotted in the Weekend magazine last Saturday a line about “swimming and driving in Darlington”. Doug accepts that there’s been a lot of rain – “but is this a stunt by the Top Gear team, I wonder?”