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?

DON’T talk to me about kiss-and-tell! And don’t even think of mentioning the sneaks who go behind your back and ‘tell all’ to the newspapers for money.

This biter has been bit . . . I have been turned over by a past master!

For sixteen years I nursed a secret. Not dark, but deeply and ruinously embarrassing. All the time I consoled myself with the thought that by keeping shtum I was protecting a family from prying eyes and vicious tongues.

Until . . . THUMP! The Sunday papers landed on the doormat outside my hotel room. It was my poor wife who picked them up, saw the headline and thrust the topmost paper towards me, speechless with shock.

“Oh my God,” I wailed. The words swam before my eyes: “Prescott – My Secret Battle with Bulimia”.

It wasn’t so much the headline that made me want to throw up just as he once did: like I say, I’d known about the Deputy Prime Minister’s eating disorder ever since he told me the gory details (over dinner!) shortly after I became editor of the Mirror in 1992. Now here he was, invading his own privacy by dangling a tasteless titbit in front of the readers to promote the newspaper serialisation of his soon-to-be published autobiography.

No, what really got my goat was how Prezza smugly recalled his first visit for treatment: “The waiting room was full of young women, I was the only man there. I felt a right twerp. Luckily none of them shopped me to the press.”

I could hardly contain my fury. A journalist robbed of The Big Story by a victim who does his own mudslinging . . . it’s indecent, almost unheard of! And what would that jury of my peers, those mocking men and women of Fleet Street make of it (I was staying with two hundred of them in Glasgow for a big media wedding at the weekend)?

Little point in claiming that I had obeyed the guidelines laid down by the Press Complaints Commission over a person’s privacy in health matters. Or that there was no overriding public interest involved. Nor even that I considered the conversation to have been private.

Sure enough, next morning’s Daily Telegraph claimed on its front page that I had “suppressed” the story when, in fact, I simply hadn’t told a soul. Interviewed on radio later that morning, one listener who didn’t much care for John Prescott attacked me for not revealing the politician’s health problem.

Dear reader, while Prezza goes off to bank his book royalties I am left to draw about me the shroud of my tattered integrity against the chill moral of this sorry tale:

You’re damned when you do but you’re dumb if you don’t.
 

MY WIFE goes off with Other Men at the weekends. It’s an arrangement we have learned to live with.

’Er Outdoors takes to the hills with the booted and backpacked Berwick Ramblers (all right, half of them are women) leaving Me Indoors with my computer and half-a-dozen deadlines to meet.

One of her gallant escorts on those day-long expeditions up Cheviot and over Kielder is our friend Griggsy, long retired from education but a world traveller, raconteur and environmentalist who still extracts the maximum pleasure from life.

Walking is David Griggs’s passion and he has produced a masterly collection of eight wonderful walks which range between one and eight miles long, criss-crossing Griggsy’s beloved parish of Ellingham and all of them suspiciously using as their start and finish points the pleasant Pack Horse Inn.

Bound in a sturdy volume and illustrated with maps, photos, historical notes and numerous wildlife observations, ‘Walking from Ellingham’ is a little masterpiece, terrific value for a fiver, and will be available from Mine Host at the Pack Horse from this evening onwards.

Published: The Journal, Newcastle   April 25, 2008

LONDON is another world. To start with, the capital is currently a whole scarf and overcoat warmer than Godzone-on-Tweed.

   More than climate, too: fellow hacks at the British Press Awards ‘do’ were wrapped only in their own parochial metro-politics, convinced that all of Britain was as fascinated as they are by the coming mayoral contest between Ken, Boris and The Other Chap.

   My reasons for being in The Smoke were twofold: as a BPA judge I was in town to carouse with the night’s Big Winner (the Sun) and commiserate with the Big Loser (the Mirror) on their respective shares of the spoils. And as a former editor and broadcaster I was down to take part in LBC Radio’s “Quiz the Candidates” show.

   I’m still not sure which event left me with the bigger headache. The Park Lane Grosvenor was awash with Piper Heidsieck (currently the editors’ champagne of choice) while LBC’s unfortunate listeners were drowned in a sea of schmaltz and schmooze, always the politicians’ preference.

   Talking of politicos, David Cameron was keynote speaker at the Press Awards, traditionally a notoriously difficult audience to control (I know, I’ve tried!) and I was encouraged to hear him describe the blue track-suited Chinese who so  rudely pushed and shoved the Olympic flame through London as “goons”.

   The knowledge that Our Dave ‘digs’ the Dalai Lama will have done nothing to endear him to Beijing.

OLD BOB, my reserve domino partner, is an incorrigible smoker and we lose him between games when he retires to light a ‘reviver’ and glow in the rain and wind and darkness.

WORD travels fast when you accidentally demolish the greenhouse. Not surprising, really: the noise of shattering panes as I plunged backwards through the glass was enough to wake the dead.
I’d been doing really well until it happened. “Close the greenhouse vent, water the lettuce, sweet peas, beans and broccoli seedlings and be sure to cover them with a fleece against overnight frost,” ‘Er Outdoors had commanded before heading off to Morocco to trek the Atlas Mountains with fellow Berwick Ramblers.
We’re enthusiastic gardeners of the organic variety, you see. Now that the threat of wind farms has receded the local agriculturals are planning to turn to the next best cash crop: biofuels.
As well as starving the already deprived Third World and providing an abundance of biodiesel with which Chelsea Tractor drivers can pollute even more of the planet, it stands to reason that more fields of waving oilseed means fewer fields of anything remotely nutritious in the way of food.
So we’re growing our own…at least, we were until I tripped over the greenhouse doorstep and – quite literally – brought the house down. And, as I said, news travels fast.
“Any injuries?” my domino partner Robbie phoned to ask. “Bad enough to keep you away from the doms on Sunday?”
I swear his wishful world clouded over when I assured him that not a single major artery had been severed and that I would be at his side, luckless as ever, this weekend.
WHY, I heard some young sprig ask on radio the other day, should local buses be made free across the nation to sixty-year-olds?
I’ll tell you why, mate. It’s ‘cos we baby boomers are becoming the majority age group, that’s why.
The Yuppies (young, upwardly mobile) and the Dinks (dual income, no kids) have had their day. Now we over-60s have a group name that at least sounds like an acronym, even if it isn’t: we are Twirlies.
Twirlies? Sure. You get on a bus five minutes before the rush hour is over, show your pensioner pass and the driver says: “Too early…”
TALKING of buses, the Coastliner bus service in North Yorkshire has just issued a free pamphlet to passengers with such helpful advice as “When can I travel? The choice is totally yours!” and “When the bus approaches give a clear signal to avoid confusion.” Talk about teaching your granny to suck eggs…
Reminds me of a bottle of posh mineral water I once bought, on the label of which was printed “Serving suggestion: just add ice.”
Truly, a cocktail is born…
I BROKE another duck last weekend. I had never addressed a curling club in my life until I was invited to be guest speaker at the Coldstream Curlers’ annual dinner.
Toon definitely lost out to country THAT night: all the ladies were busy pointing out one of their star players, “…Mrs Nevin, she’s Doctor Harvey’s daughter…” while I was sure her husband’s face was familiar.
“Oh aye,” said a curler, “that’s Pat. He’s a nice guy, too.”
That would be Pat ‘the ex-Chelsea, Hibs, Motherwell and Scottish international footballer’ Nevin then, would it?
Anyway, the only previous contact I had with the curling world was in News York where I worked with a Canadian who was always sneaking off to play despite his rather domineering wife.
“So how do you persuade her to let you out so often?” I once asked. “There’s a limit to the number of times you can promise to paper the kitchen.”
“Simple,” he said. “I turn down the lights, open a bottle of wine and ask if she fancies an early night, or should I just go curling?”
“And it works?” I asked.
“Sure,” said my curling pal. “She turns on the TV and says ‘Don’t forget to take a warm sweater!’ ”

From The Journal, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Published March28 2008

BLOGS are like landmines: once launched into cyberspace they can crashland and blow your legs off long after you have forgotten their existence.
Unlike a sturdy, old-fashioned newspaper column, which silently yellows to dust in the attic or wraps potato peelings and disintegrates at the bottom of a compost heap, blogs never go away.
Once launched, a blog eternally orbits its inventor, awaiting an opportunity to inflict vengeful embarrassment or injury. Like children, they remain for ever the creator’s responsibility, coming home to roost at the least opportune moment.
That has, dear reader, been my unfortunate experience in recent days. A producer from BBC World Service was the first person to alert me.
“By the way,” she said sniffily after phoning to trap me into a radio debate on obesity (why me?). “I had a squint at your blog site and there are some out-of-date messages you might want to acknowledge.”
Typically, I had forgotten the years-old blog I set up to carry my thoughts to the four corners of an eagerly waiting world, only to be abandoned as fast as a New Year’s resolution.
Indeed, I would have ignored the BBC Lady’s sniffy reminder had not Young Neil called to tell me that Jock the Cock, our rooster rampant, had attacked Wee Emily the Egg Collector and that we owed her a new pair of leggings.
“Oh aye,” he scoffed, “and Emily’s granny has been Googling you on the internet and she says there’s an angry reply on your blog from an upset reader!”
So I checked my blog. What I found was the blogger’s equivalent of the message in a bottle: scraps of thoughts that had been bobbing about the airwaves, forever unseen by their intended recipient.
The first, marked “Urgent!” was more than a year old: “Hello there David,” it began, “I’m trying to get hold of you urgently to see if you would talk on GMTV tomorrow morning (Jan 8, 2007) about the press interest surrounding Kate Middleton. Please give me a call asap . . .”
The second was posted last December by a London neighbour to whom I haven’t spoken in thirty years: “Just heard you again on Radio 4’s The Message. Always want to make contact, but usually hesitate. Would love to swap news about Gemma, your children and ours – Eslyn”
Finally I arrived at the “angry reader” who had contributed what turned out to be a remarkably civil rebuttal of something I had written some weeks ago in a Journal column celebrating the life of the north Northumberland estate owner Jane Lyell.
Mr Wyndham Rogers-Coltman of Ancroft had Googled up my blog site and left a message which I believe, in fairness, deserves a wider audience:
“Jane Lyell” he wrote, “was, as you say, a remarkable lady and I am sorry you never met her. I first met her in 1950 when she was a ravishing beauty and set my 18-year-old knees a-wobbling.
“But there is one area of her life which you got unfortunately wrong. Her marriage to Toby Lyell was not an unhappy one. Their twelve-year marriage before a tragic riding accident left her under 24-hour care for over 28 years was very happy. [For the next] 23 years . . . Toby lived with and cared for her throughout this terrible time. If he strayed from the straight and narrow path of fidelity, as he did, it is surely not for us to sit in judgement. Jane never did.”
Two lessons we should learn from these delayed exchanges. First, there are at least two sides to every story; everyone’s ‘truth’ comes from a different perspective.
Second, and perhaps more important, never put your faith in www.banksysblog.co.uk . . . it’s about as reliable as a shipwrecked mariner’s message in a bottle!

 BLOGGER’S FOOTNOTE: As you can see from the above, I am trying to mend my ways . . . from now on my every printed utterance - plus some that only hi