IDA Mary Goodrick, used to causing a stir on our letters pages, comes to the Diary with a plaintive question.

"Have wooden spoons, those inexpensive items that were once so essential in domestic kitchens, now been consigned to the dustbins of history?"

Her query is prompted by the latest instalment of Evening Press resident chef James Lowe's A-Z of food, which included a recipe for upside down pudding.

"Method: blitz in a food processor two ounces each of self-raising flour, butter and caster sugar.

"These ingredients - only six ounces in total - supposedly needed electrically-operated energy to combine them into a cake mixture! There was no mention of a bowl and wooden spoon."

The Tadcaster castigator concludes: "Thankful I am that my generation were able to learn the art of home baking without the need for a kitchen that was filled to the gunwales with culinary gadgets."

Is Mrs Goodrick right? Are we turning into a nation of wimps? The Diary will consider this later, after a lie down to recover from all this typing.

STILL with the printed word, Annie Wright believes we were too hard on the author of a letter sent to a customer by First bus company. The Diary's distaste for American spellings is out of date, she insists.

The York ex-pat emails: "It is not just Americans who spell 'apologize' with a 'z' rather than an 's' (though 's' is also correct). The British Oxford English Dictionary (OED) also prefers 'z'.

"I agree anyone who is singularly loose with plurals or over-generous with apostrophes should be shot. But insistence on using 's' rather than 'z' is more grandma than grammar."

She adds an unrelated postscript: "Will 'The Wedding' be sponsored by Tampax?"

GOOD to see a letter from Coun Martin Lancelott last Friday. According to our archive, that's his first appearance in the paper since September 2003.

No doubt he is doing a tremendous amount of "behind the scenes" work for his Heworth Without electors. Just like the man who Lance-notalott wrote in to support: Osbaldwick councillor Jonathan Morley, who chose to represent the views of his constituents on the Disasterthorpe housing folly by a) not speaking out about it and b) not voting against it.

THIS email arrives from a regular correspondent: "My son saw a chap come a cropper falling off his bicycle at 7.15am last Wednesday on Malton Road at the new pelican crossing.

"Strange thing is my son came off at that very same spot due to the kerb stone being high, damaging his £350 bicycle. He believes the chap he saw falling off his mount was your good self, true or false?"

True, alas. Luckily my fall was broken by my knee.

Since this unseemly topple I have heard of other cyclists being sent crashing to the ground at the point where an on-road cycle lane becomes a pavement path via a lowered kerb stone.

Is this a design fault? It looks like some work to smooth out the Malton Road cyclepath entry point has since been carried out.

Or perhaps there is there a safe way to negotiate the junction. Suggestions gratefully received.

Updated: 10:38 Tuesday, February 22, 2005