This will be my last Northside, and I'm looking through my Northside notebook at certain outstanding fragments - outstanding, that is, in the sense of leftover. I see that last summer in Bridport, I bought for £1.50 a second-hand LP: Laugh With The Comedians. The Comedians was an ITV series that plundered the Crimplene-bow-tied talent of the northern clubs. The LP featured Bernard Manning, Ken Goodwin and Frank Carson, among others.

Aged ten in York, I could never decide which of these was my favourite, and would sometimes be rendered unable to breathe, what with laughing at their gags and passively smoking the hundreds of fags consumed by my "uncle" Peter, who always seemed to be in the house when they were on the telly.

Whatever happened to Ken Goodwin and his catchphrase, "Settle down now", which was surely problematic, given that it could only work with an audience on the verge of hysterical laughter? Apart from the obviously brilliant Bernard Manning (I particularly liked his joke about the man who'd been unemployed so long that he went to the dole office staff dances), the best one, in retrospect, was Duggie Brown, who looked like a page-boy, and whom I saw once at Wetherby Races . . .

The fascinatingly romantic-looking, Leeds-born folk singer Jake Thackray, I see from my notebook, died in December 2002. I spent most of 2003 meaning to write about him but was put off by all this business about him being in thrall to the French chansonniers, whoever they were. In the late 1970s, he sang lugubrious topical songs on That's Life, and my dad used to fume at the sight of him. He preferred the rest of the so-called "That's Life team", thus getting things exactly the wrong way round. In an attempt to make up for this, perhaps, he sent me Thackray's obituary, neatly snipped out from the Guardian.

Turning to the later entries in my notebook, I see that in late November I helped lay out the second-hand books that would be up for sale at the winter fair of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution. Among them were three biographies - all by different authors - of the great Yorkshire and England fast bowler Fred Trueman. I later helped pack away the unsold books, and the Trueman biographies were not among them. Who says the north hates the south? Then again, is any such reconciliation a good thing? The north and south are undoubtedly becoming more similar, but I'm with Bill Bryson, who won't go into a Starbucks because it's an agent of British homogenisation - a manufacturer, in fact, of boredom.

Meanwhile, I will revisit for the NS a British battleground that seems to be as gratifyingly blood-spattered as ever. Class Conscious returns next week.