"Blood and sand," exclaimed Samuel Cunliffe Lister, staring skywards at the new edifice. "What's that?"

"That," said the stonemason and builder Arthur Clutterbuck, idly picking his teeth with a piece of horse tram ticket, "is the chimbley you ordered, squire. Good, innit?"

"Good," said Lister, reaching for his handkerchief to wipe his streaming brow. "Good? It's enormous. How tall is it?"

"Two hundred and fifty five feet and a quarter of an inch," said the artisan. "It would have been two fifty five dead but I've left me sandwich on the top. I've told the wife I don't like corned beef. But..."

"But it's huge. It's ... well. It's not supposed to be that big - don't you see?" wailed Lister.

He had been his own architect on his new mills at Manningham and doubt assailed him. Had he had a brainstorm? The new chimney towered over the surrounding area.

"Good God, man," he said, trying to regain his composure. "You can probably see it from the middle of Ilkley Moor!"

"You can," said Clutterbuck complacently. "Have you brought the champagne for the topping out? There's plenty of room up there. I reckon you could get a horse and carriage around the top of that chimbley if you took it steady."

Lister, who had just returned from a Grand Tour of Europe and the Americas, had seen nothing like it on his travels. He called for his carriage and gave his driver the orders: "Cheapside," he said. "Fast."

Before his brougham had stopped outside the Cheapside offices of Perkin and Whitaker, blueprint manufacturers, Lister had jumped down, negotiated the puddles and stormed through the door.

"Where's Perkin?" he demanded. "I'm going to skin him alive!"

A timorous nose appeared from behind a partition, followed by its timorous owner. "Why Mister Lister," said the man. "Whatever's the matter?"

"That damn chimney's the matter. It's over 250 feet high. It's supposed to be a hundred and fifty, no more. What happened? And another thing - why isn't there a lightning conductor?"

"A what?" asked Perkin.

"A lightning conductor. I told you to use one didn't I? I remember telling you - don't forget Benjamin Franklin's greatest contribution to mankind's safety."

"Eeeh, Mister Lister," said Perkin. "I thought you meant bifocal glasses. I wore them all the time, but they take a bit of getting used to. They're funny. They make the bottom of a drawing look big, but when you get to the top it all looks smaller. I had a devil of a job doing that chimney."

"How on earth," demanded Lister, "could you call bifocals a contribution to mankind's safety?"

"Well," said Perkin, "I've not once walked into a lamp-post since I bought them."

It's great Ovver Theer...

"Let me just get this right," said Sven the Widowmaker.

"You've got this track that goes past a barn where you keep your grain over winter. It's got ditches dug for drainage. And it's got little hummocks where the muck from the ditch got thrown.

"And you simply call it 'ovver theer?'"

"Aye," said Aelbert, the Saxon Yorkshireman. "If anybody usks me wheer I live, I say: 'Ovver Theer'."

Sven scratched the back of his neck with the pointed bit of his battleaxe. His eyes, used to scanning the horizon from the prow of his Viking longship, took on a faraway look.

"The way I see it is this. Ovver Theer doesn't do anything for the punters. They want something classy, particularly the newcomers from Frisia and Jutland.

"You're not going to sell a des. res., with main ditch drainage, twig-fired central heating with its own smokehole and a granny flat-cum-piggery if you describe it as in Ovver Theer."

"What am I supposed to call it?" asked Aelbert. "Hampstead?"

"No," said Sven. "There's no need to lie." (he was an unusually scrupulous estate agent). "We just need to give the area a new name. Something modern, something Scandinavian..."

"You mean like Ikea?" asked Aelbert.

"No, but something with a bit of a Norse twang to it, a bit of pzazz.

"Let's see. A laithe barn, standing on a dyke. How about ... Laisterdyke?"

"Crikey," said Aelbert. "Nobody'll be able to say it, never mind spell it."

"They'll get used to it," said Sven. "After all, they've learned to pronounce L-O-I-D-I-S as Leeds, haven't they?"

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.