HOW often I find rather serious moments painfully funny, especially at times when outright laughter would be inappropriate.

Journalists, in particular, store up memorable conversations for ribald repetition.

Once, interviewing a grieving son, I asked what his father’s last words were.

“Dad had no last words,” sniffed the sorrowing offspring. “My mother was there . . .”

I remember a colleague telephoning the headmaster of a local Catholic high school to be greeted with the reply: “Good morning, the head of John the Baptist speaking.”

And a woman reporter who blushed when, having asked a spritely pair of ninety-year-olds celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary if they had ever been bedridden, was told by the old lady: “Oh yes, quite often, but we both were much younger then!”

Golfers, of course, have lots to laugh about: it comes from spending too much time at the 19^th. Big Ian Martin of Goswick delights in recounting his visit to a pub during a golf trip to Anstruther in Fife, where he noticed a series of small brass nameplates screwed into the bar.

“What must one do to earn one of these?” he asked the rather grumpy barmaid, thinking perhaps of a hole in one or an albatross.

“Die,” she replied, sourly.

Anyway, I’m delighted to report that even coroners have their favourite tales. Bringing in a suicide verdict, one chap explained tenderly to grieving relatives that the evidence showed the deceased had washed down a lethal handful of barbiturates with two cans of lager from a six-pack found beside the bed.

“Do you have any questions?” he intoned, sympathetically.

“Aye,” said the deceased man’s brother. “What happened to the other four lagers?”

I WILL tell you why senior planning judge Mr Justice Andrew Collins overruled Blyth Valley Council’s requirement that house builders discount 30% of their developments in order to supply homes at (locally) affordable prices.

It is because Mr Justice Collins is driven from his top value home in the comfortable SOUTH-EAST to sit in the High Court in big-spending LONDON and as a result has no real knowledge of the comparative peanuts ordinary folk in the NORTH-EAST earn.

We need homes affordable for locals as well as new arrivals, possibly to buy but preferably to provide rental accommodation

You begin to see why the Scots yearn for independence, don’t you?

EAT your hearts out Messrs Hann, Poole and Gutteridge! My fellow Journal columnists will turn green with envy this morning upon learning of my newly acquired celebrity status.

From the moment a Mr and Mrs Hardwick of Tweedmouth dropped in on our weekly coffee morning in Crookham village hall I became – admittedly in my own mind – a North Northumberland tourist attraction.

As big as Bamburgh Castle, as keenly sought as the wild beasts at Chillingham . . . that’s me.

Keen Journal readers, the Hardwicks had called in for a coffee in hopes of “bumping into Banksy”. Imagine!

But it gets better . . . my very own celebrity stalkers will meet me for a second time soon when I personally deliver the raffle prize they won. Joy, surely, will be unconfined.

All this is rather new to me. When I give my little local talks – donations always go to the Josie Grove Leukaemia Fund – I receive scant attention and am more likely to be accosted for news of that rampaging rooster Jock the Cock or the latest doings of The Byreman, which I supply somewhat grumpily.

I am now busy producing autographed photos of myself with neither cockerel nor Byreman in evidence.

Incidentally, reports reach me of an imposter who presents himself proudly to the gullible – particularly to groups of lady golfers – as “The Byreman”. Frankly, why anyone would wish to represent himself as that mutton-chopped, bibulous old Tory I fail to see, but there it is – you have been warned.

david_banks@hotmail.com

WHEN I dumped this column in the editor’s laptop yesterday the deadline was long gone, my copy horribly late. I had more important things to do first, I told him.

Like writing a letter to the Press Complaints Commission asking why I should I have my privacy invaded by a publicity-hungry, cash-obsessed celebrity barrister who has spent the last twelve years making her children’s nannies sign confidentiality agreements?

And why the woman who left Downing Street with a verbal two-finger salute at the media – “We won’t miss YOU lot!” – then races into print in that low-life rag The Times (and the only slightly more respectable Sun) to ruin my breakfast with revelations about her contraception arrangements and the day her baby filled his nappy at the White House. Not to mention her teenage son sicking up and sleeping it off in Leicester Square (Er, didn’t she once tell us not to mention that? – Ed.)

Yes, it was a busy morning. When I should have been keeping Higher Authority happy with my weekly report on the doings of The Byreman and Jock the Cock I was actually firing off an angry email to the Law Society to ask if practicing lawyers (and a Recorder to boot!) like Cherie Booth-bloody-Blair are allowed to invade their own privacy (and mine!) even if it IS for a million quid or more.

I know, I know . . . just the evening before I had been telling Berwick Civic Society members – who donated £50 to the Josie Grove Leukaemia Fund for the benefit of my advice – that if you don’t approve of a newspaper’s contents the solution is, quite literally, in your own hands. In my case, the offending newspapers are now lining our compost bin.

But there really is no escape from ‘suicide bomber’ celebs bent on lobbing Semtex-like lumps of their private lives wrapped inside otherwise humdrum headlines to destroy the peace and quiet of this reader’s privacy: no sooner had I dumped the Cherie-sodden rags down the garden than That Woman popped up again for half-an-hour’s free advertising on Woman’s Hour!

It gets worse: every weekday morning on Radio Four next week That Woman will be reading instalments of her autobiography in the Beeb’s Book of the Week spot.

I for one won’t be listening and I appeal to like-minded protesters to join me in a powerful alternative: Banksy’s Blair Switch Project.

At ten every morning from Monday to Friday next week, having cancelled the offending newspapers, I will switch off Radio Four and carry out a discussion based on the sensible news headlines that occupy the pages of The Journal,

You can hear me, message me and talk to me live at www.banksy.fm until we both run out of things to say.

And you won’t hear a word from That Woman, I promise . . .

BROKEN promises being a speciality of mine, I can’t resist asking why, if the Blairs conceived Baby Blair sans contraception at a royal residence, they didn’t do a Posh ’n’ Becks and name him after the palace?

After all, as one of the boys in the Milfield Sunday Domino League was heard to say: “If we’re talking about naming kids after the place they were conceived I’d have to call my three Melrose Sevens, Kelso Races and Ford Anglia!”

Calling a baby ‘Balmoral Blair’ doesn’t sound quite so bad after that, does it?

WHILE we’re playing name games, an email from my old pal Dick Herkes in Chester-le-Street informs me that his granddaughter and her friends at Fyling Hall School in Robin Hood’s Bay have added a cockerel and two hens to the pets’ corner . . . and called them Ken, Tucky and Fried.

Something tells me those chickens are heading for an unhappy ending!

david_banks@hotmail.com

WHEREVER I travelled in life I seemed always to arrive ten years too late.

“You think this is fun?” sniggered old hands at The Journal when this spotty-chinned, wide-eyed nineteen-year-old arrived in Newcastle. “You should have been here ten years ago; this was a great town then!”

They said the same when I turned up in Fleet Street and again when I sought fame and fortune in New York. When I landed in Australia it was the same old story. And my eventual homecoming to London, of course, came Just Too Late. The good old days were gone for ever; the great characters had passed on.

Is it only people in big cities who spend their lives looking through rose-tinted rear view mirrors? Rural communities seem to have a greater sense of timelessness, an appreciation of the way things are, have always been and will, quite probably, remain.

Tweedo Paradiso, the land I had left 35 years earlier, was much the same upon my return: similar landscape (slightly more traffic) and the same people, older now but familiar faces from my youth.

When death inevitably rearranges that social landscape there is a sad but stoical acceptance of a kind that I never found in the metropolis, where the passing of even the oldest amongst us takes on an artificial mantle of tragedy.

Perhaps country folk are closer to Nature. They see at close hand the changing seasons, the sowing and the reaping and the steady journey of animals from stable to table as necessary linkage in the food chain.

As a result, few people are better conditioned to meet their Maker.

This week, cunningly timing his departure to coincide with his favourite pub closing its doors, one of my oldest friends bade farewell at a grand old 84. Farmer Peter Logan of Callerburn only ever required a dark rum and pep and Guinness chaser to regale all who would listen with his tales of the old days, good and bad.

He told of Dads’ Army weapons dumps and emergency food stores hidden in caves in Kyloe Woods against a German invasion, and of lost days and drunken nights when a successful visit to Reston Mart could see profit turned to loss in the twinkling of a landlord’s eye.

Some of Old Logan’s pals began his week-long wake as he would have wished, with a winning day at Kelso Races. There The Byreman reminded all of the day Peter bumped into the auctioneer Tom Rankin, another great character from those good old days, and the two men fell repaired to the bar.

Having confessed drunkenly his wish to buy “two score of best breeding heifers” Peter awoke briefly to find himself beside the slumbering auctioneer on a flight to Ireland and again later on a flight back to Newcastle.

Two days later an Irish cattle truck arrived and, while Peter struggled to recall his winning bid, offloaded the most expensive herd of heifers Callerburn had ever seen.

But there was more. “What’s the donkey for?” asked the bemused farmer as the ass was led down the ramp.

“You bought him,” said the delivery driver, “after the seller told you a farm with a donkey would never go bankrupt!”

A PRICELESS moment from a recent high society Borders wedding (Zara Phillips was among the invited guests) occurred when the local knackerman – he hauls dead animals from farm to slaughterhouse – downed enough Dutch courage to ask the prettiest girl at the ball to accompany him onto the dance floor.

They made a fine couple and as he escorted the young lady back to her table the knackerman made so bold as to ask where she lived.

“Floors,” she replied.

“Floors Castle,” said her beau knowingly. “Your father works for the Duke of Roxburgh then?”

“Actually,” said the lass, “my dad IS the Duke of Roxburgh…”

I HOPE you voted yesterday. I did: I voted at the village hall we’re trying to save, across the road from the part-time post office we’re about to lose and only a thresher’s thirsty walk away from the village pub which this week so mysteriously and depressingly closed its doors.

What’s all that got to do with politics, you might ask? Everything, actually. For three hundred-or-so days of each year village hall, post office and pub are the epicentre of my life in Paradis-sur-Tweed. Throw in a local shopping trip (we lost our village emporium years ago) and time spent in the garden and you there glimpse a substantial portion of my life.

There’s more, of course there is: writing columns, broadcasting, trips to London, foreign holidays, occasional appearances on telly. But when it comes to happiness then post office, village hall and pub are pretty much the hub.

In my Other Life I’ve enjoyed meeting the powerful and the famous. I still do, but I wouldn’t dream of talking about them (given the resentment such self-inflating recollections engender among The Journal’s letter writers). Besides, as the Queen once told me, “Never name-drop, Banksy…”

The point is, local politics is so much more accessible and important to the quality of our everyday lives: public pressure blew away plans for four massive wind farms up here in north Northumberland while public ridicule has forced Berwick council into an embarrassed climbdown on its risible ‘zero tolerance’ policy concerning local business signs.

No such luck in affecting national or international issues: my wife and daughter joined the million who marched in London and Glasgow to stop Bush and Blair invading Iraq. Where did THAT get them?

Many of you – not me! – would have Britain turn its back on Brussels and bolt the nation’s door against incomers. Fat chance!

But when it comes to local politics, coalitions of interests make strange bedfellows: there is no more mutton-chopped an old Tory than The Byreman but he’s been striding the shire shouting the odds for the local Lib Dem who “understands the farmer”.

And me? I did the unthinkable and actually read the literature supplied by our local young Conservative candidate, an engaging chap who shares my concerns for a sense of community and rural solidarity and who comes to our village events.

I won’t say where I put my ‘X’. I don’t expect you to tell me where you put yours.

But I hope you voted yesterday . . .

BEST line ever from the groom’s speech at a wedding Gemma and I recently attended: “I’m pleased to see the marriage service encourages me to take SIXTEEN wives,” he said with a nervous glance at his bride. “Four better, four worse, four richer, four poorer . . .”

MY undying admiration for young Josie Grove, who was killed by leukaemia, and my own brush with the disease cause me to take a continuing interest in research into the illness. I commend this recent item to parents’ attention.

Professor Patricia Butler, an eminent epidemiologist at The University of Southern California, has produced startling research indicating that children who attend playgroups or go to day care – in other words mix freely with other young children and share their childhood infections – are 30 per cent less likely to contract childhood leukaemia because their immune systems are better developed.

Strange ‘myths’ from my own early life flood back: “A peck of dirt won’t harm you”, my aunt was fond of saying as she dusted down a dropped piece of toast…”Keep a dog in the house and the kids won’t get asthma,” my gran used to say. And weren’t we encouraged to catch our pals chickenpox and measles so we wouldn’t be troubled in later life?

Won’t it be great if ALL the Old Wives Tales turn out to be true?