DIARY reader Malcolm Foster wants to know how many babies were born in York on Saturday last week.

Because he reckons there was such a rush of deliveries, the harassed midwives had to call in airborne reinforcements.

Malcolm, from Gladstone Street, in Acomb, swears he saw a stork flying over the Lowfields area. He's not a twitcher, he admits, but he was brought up in the country and knows his stork from his butter - and from a heron.

"A mate suggested it might be a heron, but I know what it was. It was massive and was being mobbed by local crows who did not like it in their area," he insisted.

Last year, there were reports that storks had been nesting in West Yorkshire, so why shouldn't they have moved into our neighbouring county?

No reason at all. Anyone else spotted this winged phenomenon in the York area?

SLIGHTLY red faces at BBC Look North at the on-screen launch of their new archive series, Yorkshire And Lincolnshire On Film.

It was meant to be a cosy littlechat with Christa Ackroyd, Harry Gration and weatherman Paul Hudson bantering about classic Look North news footage of the past.

Cue a carefully chosen Look North clip of the Holbeck Hall Hotel falling off the cliff at Scarborough, and Christa launched into a nostalgic reminiscence about the late, great, Richard Whiteley's coverage of the dramatic event.

Perplexed silence from Harry and Paul.

Richard Whiteley did indeed report on the Holbeck Hall collapse. Unfortunately, his report was for Look North's rivals Yorkshire Television, in the days when Richard and Christa were co-presenters of Calendar. Whoops!

Next week on Look North...Richard Whiteley is attacked by a ferret...

KEITH HARTLAND is an ex-headteacher of a state school, and reckons standards of literacy should be maintained.

So the Clifton man was interested in the notice, pictured below, posted on a gate at the independent, fee-paying Bootham School. It read: "Gate out of order, please use other entry's."

Never mind the question of the inappropriate apostrophe, nor the use of the singular rather than the plural, but Mr Hartland says he would have been ashamed to have seen that on his humble state school door.