Sweet Pimbo

Welcome to the Northerner, theguardian.com's weekly digest of the best of the northern press

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What's in a name? A lot, for me. I was over in Lancashire this week for the launch of the government's Bee Health strategy and it was great to find that the venue was near a village called Pimbo.

I looked it up on Google Maps and couldn't understand at first why the high-definition maps were completely blank. Then I scrolled out and discovered that the world's number one Pimbo is on the otherwise uninhabited border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Add "Lancashire" to the search box and bingo! - or rather, Pimbo! - there we are, between Crank and Up Holland, with Chequer just the other side of the M58. It was a delightful place, and excellent to meet the government's chief bee inspector for the north of England in an orchard off Pimbo Lane, along with one of his seasonal inspectors who keeps hives on the roof of Liverpool Museum.

The hives produce a rich dark honey, he told me, because the city has so many trees with tiny flowers. Which we don't notice, but the bees do.

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Liverpool is in the northern news this week where names are concerned. The Daily Post reports the start of a campaign to rebrand the village of Lunt, north of Bootle. You can guess why, if I tell you that vandals keep altering the road signs by using a small piece of black sticky tape.

A Conservative council candidate, Dr Martyn Ball, wants a permanent change to Launt, to foil the vandals while keeping near enough to the original Norse of Lundr, meaning a grove of trees. Judging by the reaction in the Post, he may be damaging his election chances.

Stewart Dobson, who is 84 and has sat on the parish council for 30 years, reckons the name-altering is as old as he is. "The tape falls off when it rains," he says cheerfully, while David Roughley, whose family have farmed in the village since 1851, says tersely: "It's Lunt, and that's it."

Meddle with Lunt at your peril, but do visit the village website (www.lunt-village.co.uk) whose very first sentence notes loftily how lesser places' names "have been bastardised over the years".

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I've also been right the other side of the north this week, in the world beyond the end of the world, aka Withernsea. I rescued a two-week-old copy of the Holderness Gazette from a takeaway and was interested to read a proud claim to civic links with "Soho impresario and porn baron Paul Raymond who has passed away at the age of 82".

The man behind Men Only - ah, relatively innocent days - used to potter round Withernsea in the early 1950s while still trying to break into showbiz. Known then as Geoffrey Anthony Quinn, he was the lowly drummer in the resident band at the Grand Pavilion and lodged with the late Mr & Mrs George Rowland in Bannister Street.

At this point, in the best tradition of local newspapers, we take leave of boring old Soho porn barons, and focus on the Rowlands. George was apparently "a fascinating and intelligent man, always immaculate in his appearance even in later years and of an era when he always doffed his hat to the ladies". I don't think that this is a euphemism, but the Gazette reveals that Raymond kept in touch with his old landlord until the end, with news of his latest "sex-orientated comedy shows including Pyjama Tops".

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Well done the Selby Times for cracking the riddle of the mystery musicians who uploaded an unflattering song about the town to YouTube. Titled Selbyville, it doesn't paint quite the picture that North Yorkshire's tourist people like to have about life on the lower reaches of the Ouse.

It wasn't a very taxing piece of detective work. Once the Times had raised the question of who was behind the prank, local students Danny Martland and John Wace, who are both 20, rang up and said it was them. They often write perky songs for their MySpace web page, apparently, but you can tell from their comments to the Times that they know about the etiquette of living in a small town.

"We didn't write Selbyville as a controversial thing, it was just a bit of fun," says Danny. "We don't intend to offend anyone - a lot of it is just based on true events."

Their friends consider it dead good, and the best way to hear it is to go to Selby, where subversives have adapted it as the ringtone for their mobile phones.

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At last! I have found somewhere that actually wants to have one of the government's proposed new "eco-towns". They have sent people into a panic across Britain, but not in sturdy Cambois near Blyth, whose News Post Leader - a masthead that deserves some sort of indecisiveness award - reports anger that Northumberland's "forgotten village" has been forgotten yet again.

They really, really did want an eco-town in Cambois, where the post office, shop and pub have successively gone. Locals were pinning their hopes, says the News Post Leader, on "a multi-million pound development" to replace them.

Instead, the government has turned them down and indeed ignored Northumberland altogether. Cambois's Neighbourhood Watch coordinator, Mel Jackson, says: "They don't listen to what residents want." Julie Hobbs airs a common local view: "Once again the north loses out to the south."

Northumberland county council tries to salve the wound by promising that Cambois is going to have something called a Growth Point Bid in to another lottery of government handouts. According to Mel Jackson & Co, this means it is going to be the site for a new power station.

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Just to update you on big northern stories of recent times: the Fleetwood Weekly News reports that 10 companies are bidding for the contract to remove that poor stranded ferry, the Riverdance. Efforts to refloat it from the beach beside the trams to Blackpool have completely failed, and salvage firms are now being invited to remove the ship "by whatever means they can".

Local residents in Clevelys can't wait, telling the Weekly News that sightseers are ruining their nice grass verges and parking on private property. This seems a sadly unenterprising reaction to a great opportunity to make dosh, as one of the paper's bloggers points out.

"The Riverdance is the most effective tourist attraction this coast has seen for years," says Tell-it-as-it-is from North Shore. "Hang on - the council could buy the hulk, call it a sculpture and take all the credit!" In practice there's likely to be one final tourist bonanza if the ferry, which was blown adrift in January's gales, is cut up on the beach like a whale.

MARTIN WAINWRIGHT RECOMMENDS

An unusual one: Northern Gas Networks is sponsoring an exhibition of smells at the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland from April 29. Perfumiers have manufactured the scent of 14 things we could never normally smell, such as the surface of the sun, an extinct holly bush and the inside of the Mir space station. The gas people are involved because they've added the aroma of a gas leak, which is handily practical as you drift through the other, less worldly ones.

In Beverley, the archives of Withernsea's volunteer beach patrol 50 years ago have been picked as "documents of the month" at the Treasure House library, gallery and museum. The group was set up when sea bathing became popular in Withernsea after sewage got into Lee Avenue open-air swimming pool. Its veterans like to think they inspired Baywatch - maybe Paul Raymond had a word with his Los Angeles chums.

Finally, if you thought driving examiners were hard-hearted collectors of a government stealth tax, suspend judgment until you have read the Barnsley Chronicle. It reports that the local team is having to bend driving test rules to stop everybody failing - which would really stress Barnsley out after the defeat by Cardiff in the FA Cup.

The problem is that inconsiderate parking (a well-known Yorkshire habit, I have to say reluctantly) has made it all but impossible for examinees to negotiate the last part of the test route successfully. Double lines of vehicles have turned the approach to the test centre into a defile like the ones the Spartans defended at Thermopylae.

"I had one woman taking her test with me and as she was pulling out of the centre she was suddenly faced with an articulated lorry in front of her in a very tight space," says Glen Kitchen, who manages the centre. "She didn't know what to do and I had to tell her how to handle the situation.

"Technically she could have failed her test because of that, but it's a matter of discretion on our part and you can't blame her for panicking a little." Excellent man.

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