Veteran North-East journalist Mike Amos has published a 390-page autobiography, Unconsidered Trifles, embracing 55 years in the inky trade and with many stories of Newton Aycliffe and its environs.

They range from the great snowstorm of 1979 – over the first weekend of British Summer Time – to an eye-opening more recent visit to the Big Club and recall Great Aycliffe characters like local councillor Tony Moore, domino player Norman Kent, North Briton pub landlord Allan Edgar and Jim Whitton, his pies still savoured in the mind of many older residents.

Mike also remains friends with former Newton Aycliffe police inspector Gordon Bacon, appointed OBE in 1998 for helping lead the relief effort in war-torn Bosnia. Gordon swore that he’d been sustained by canned English beer.

“I don’t know who invented the widget, but if it was a woman I want to marry her,” he said.

Norman Kent, who lived in Aycliffe Village, was reckoned Britain’s best domino player – his membership of the Magic Circle wholly coincidental. On one occasion at the national finals in Bridlington, he’d so badly damaged his hands in an early morning fall that he had to stand his dominoes on their sides, as if playing in the kindergarten cup.

“He just overbalanced, all those double sixes in his trousers pocket,” said a team mate, unsympathetically.

The great blizzard was on the weekend of March 16-18, much of the North-East cut off. After struggling to Shildon, Mike and a photographer found Middridge Bank impassable by road, begged a bed from Tony Moore – who lived in Grassholme Place – and arranged to meet him in the Southerne Club.

The press party arrived bedraggled and soaked through. Tony, as ever, was immaculate in three-piece suit with matching tie and never-blown handkerchief. Mike at once pinched it in order to wipe his spectacles. “It was the closest I ever saw,” he writes, “to the admirable Councillor Moore losing his rag.”

Mike Amos was born and brought up in Shildon and raised on Jones’s pop and Jim’s Pies. Appointed MBE in 2006 for services to journalism, he was seven times North-East Journalist of the Year between 1989-2006 and was an inaugural member of the Provincial Journalism Hall of Fame.

Unconsidered Trifles, richly anecdotal and comprehensively illustrated, costs £10 softback plus £3.20 postage and £22 hardback plus £3.80 postage. It’s available via Amazon, by on-line banking – details on mikeamos81@aol.com or by sending a cheque to Mike at 8 Oakfields, Middleton Tyas, Richmond, North Yorkshire DL10 6SD.