Paradise maintained

Visionaries in a myopic world, Geoff and Jean Foster celebrated on Tuesday 30 years as Willington's only optician. Though it may not perhaps be said that we saw our way clear to so doing, the column - a heartsink patient - went along to clink a glass and cut the cake.

Full of fast food places, the old high street in the former County Durham pit town may no longer be said to be bustling. Even the pubs struggle: the Lion and Unicorn has lost the battle, the Brewer's Droop proved predictably ephemeral.

A tattoo parlour tries to drum up business, a couple of tanning studios may look heavenwards this sun-blessed summer and instantly feel browned off. "When the Fosters opened, all Willington needed was an optician's,"someone says. "Now it's about all we've got."

The story is repeated across the region. Geoff and Jean survive; prosper perhaps, neither derailed by Vision Express nor foreclosed by Specsavers. It's Jean who has appeared more often hereabouts, author of the famous observation "Oh, you're colour blind as well", but manifestly there is more to optometry than meets the eye.

Geoff was a Spennymoor lad, studied in London. Jean was a London lass, studied in Newcastle. They met when a gang of fellers moved in next door to a house full of young ladies. "It was October and he didn't ask me out until April," Jean recalls. "Unfortunately for me, I coincided with the rugby season."

They began independently in Hartlepool in 1975, moved to Willington the following year amid the last real heatwave. "We were on the sunny side of the street in those days," Jean recalls. "As fast as we put paint on those old premises, so it blistered again."

Even balloon-bedecked, the present place is externally humble. The inside story is wholly different. Among the birthday guests is a chap from West Auckland whose wife had sight problems after a brain haemorrhage.

"I asked the doctor at Sunderland Eye Infirmary for the best optician," he says. "He sent me straight to Geoff."

What's changed most in 30 years, says Geoff, is that the emphasis in optometry has moved from clinical to retail. He's still a clinician. "When I started there was no advertising at all, it was regarded as being unprofessional. Large companies and multiple groups have crept up, but perhaps the approach is a little bit more fragmented. You don't necessarily see the same person all the time.

"Their expectations may be more financial. I've never been very commercially minded myself. You might say that there's not a lot of passing trade in Willington."

Within that frame, things have much changed. A good optician can now detect evidence of all manner of disease, including circulatory, brain and blood pressure disorders. "You can no longer set up with a set of lenses, a stack of test charts and a trial frame. You wouldn't recognise the test room from the 1970s," says Geoff. "We have tried to keep abreast of developments, but unfortunately the pathetic level of NHS test fees hasn't kept up with us. We have 21st century technology and 1950s fees." For each test they receive £18.39.

Other patients talk of his honesty, his generosity and his care. "It's a very peculiar job," says Geoff. "It can be very interesting when someone has obviously something seriously wrong with his eyesight."

You mean like these myopic old mincers? He assumes the clinical term. "There's nothing seriously wrong with your eyesight," he says. "It's just crap."

Services rendered, eye for an eye-witness, we received some smoked salmon - Geoff fishes the Scottish rivers - a bottle of something French with which to enjoy it and lunch at the Red Lion in North Bitchburn, three miles away.

Keith Young's doing a good job up there, the place particularly buoyant because last weekend the village cricket team - invincible in the 1960s - last weekend won their first trophy for 18 years. They arrived back at the pub about 6.30pm. So when did they leave? "One or two may have been a bit after 11," says Keith. Even in those days of deregulation, it's a licensed trade euphemism meaning that they got home with the milkman.

County councillor Brian Myers usually performs these little duties in Willington, almost endless public offices jangling metaphorically from the key ring round his middle. Now, however, he's stepping down after 16 years as steward of the Crook and Willington Methodist circuit - a move coinciding with the retirement of the Rev Tom Wilkinson, the circuit minister, and with one of Tom's celebrated songs of praise.

"We couldn't just give him a gift voucher," says Tom. This one; almost appropriately sung to the tune of The Red Flag, may be the only hymn in which "worm" rhymes with "Durham". It begins:

The people's flag is deepest red

And while the world is still in bed

The early bird has caught the worm

And on his way once more to Durham...

Tom Wilkinson, a Glaswegian, has been writing hymns since he was 16, gazed upon the River Clyde and was inspired. An anthology of 50 of the best, each written to a familiar tune, has been left for the good folk of Crook. "It's verbosity in the extreme," he insists. "It's not Milton or Shakespeare, but I hope within my limits that it's serviceable."

Usually for special occasions, his work includes a hymn to the tune of Blow the Wind Southerly sung at a women's gathering in Durham Cathedral and a Christmas carol in Scottish dialect. "They wouldn't understand it in Darlington," he says. "I doubt if they even understand it in Glasgow."

Hymn and hearse, he's written funeral send-offs, too. He and his wife Enid have now moved to a village nine miles from Kilmarnock and 26 miles from the nearest Methodist church.

Scotland isn't like the North-East, he supposes, where once there was a chapel on every corner. Stationed from Shipley to the Shetlands, Crook and Willington was his first post in the region. "I wish we'd come earlier, because people have been so friendly. Perhaps they'll remember me by those songs."

Brian Myers - "We all salute you, Councillor Myers. One of this world's greatest triers", wrote the minister - is also just back from his second Buckingham Palace garden party in two years. The sandwiches are notoriously small. There may not be too much call for iced coffee in Sunnybrow, either.

At the first, he represented Durham County Council. This one, he mischievously supposes, may have been the result of the Princess Royal's visit to Willington last year. The princess, as they say in those parts, had had a pet on all morning. "One of her equerries said he didn't know what I said to her, but she left Willington in a much better mood than when she arrived."

The garden party invitation followed soon afterwards.

Mooching along Willington high street, we bump into an old friend of George Reynolds's. The former Darlington FC chairman has lots of friends in Willington, some first encountered while unavoidably detained.

The old lad recently celebrated his 70th birthday in one of those West Yorkshire prisons which make incarceration Wetherby's principal employer. He's fine, it's reported, wore his best suit and Gucci shoes to mark the occasion, got out to the shops in Leeds a few days later.

George's cousin Richie Tennick, shamefully jailed for two years on similar tax evasion charges, is already free. George, given three years, hopes to be out in the autumn.

"He's already talking of what he's going to do," says his friend. "George has a plan... "

Two alternatives chorused after lunch at the Red Lion: either the No 1 bus back to Darlington or a stroll in the County Durham countryside. Whosoever claims it normally to be their number one, on an afternoon like Tuesday the bus should only be for the anxious and the infirm. We ambled down from North Bitchburn to High Grange, between Bishop Auckland and Crook, where a new community garden was officially opened in June. That it wasn't opened by me was because I was returning from holiday that day.

High Grange is tiny, probably no more than 50 houses. They call it their "doorstep" garden and everything in it is lovely - right down to the now almost-obligatory botanical metalwork. Since it wasn't one of the things forbidden by the notice on the gate, we sat on a bench and waited for the three o'clock muse.

They'd sought all sorts of potential "celebrity" openers, at each turn deterred by the fee. The column being unavailable, the eventual honours were done by someone who gave his services every bit as freely. Feller called Brian Myers.

Thereafter across the old iron bridge beneath the railway viaduct and over the Wear - many a fishermen's tale told there - and on to Witton Park, miraculously restored. (More miraculous yet, had there been an ice cream shop.) A local authority sign identifies the gateway to Paradise - "maintenance vehicles only" - though the information is barely necessary. On such a God's-in-his-heaven afternoon, nirvana needed no maintaining. Tuesday was Paradise regained.