WHICH would be a better tourist attraction for York: the big wheel, or a big whale?

Tourist chiefs plumped for the former. And they were quite right, according to one who knows.

Viv Wellburn was there the last time a whale corpse was displayed for the edification of York residents and visitors.

It was not an experience she longs to repeat.

Last week, in the wake of a bottlenose whale's fatal Thames adventure, we recalled how one of its forebears starred in the City of York Ideal Homes Exhibition 40 years ago.

Why anyone imagined that the ideal home remained incomplete without 69 tons of marine mammal carcass has been lost in the intervening decades.

But there it was: Jonah, a giant, embalmed lump of blubber sitting on a flatbed truck in St George's Field.

Mrs Wellburn, now 78 and living in Acomb, took her family along. "My son was about ten years old at the time," she tells the Diary. "That probably accounts for his lifelong indifference to sea life.

"When we saw it, bits were dropping off. It wasn't exactly one of the wonders of the deep."

She doesn't think the sight scared or scarred her children. "They were so used to me dragging them to see things, they were almost immune to it."

Jonah certainly did the rounds. Pat Scrancher, of Tadcaster, saw it ten years earlier while staying with her grandparents in Weymouth, on the Dorset coast, when she was 14. She even has a picture.

"It's a postcard. There's a man standing by the side of the mouth of the whale," Mrs Scrancher said.

But, despite that memento, she has almost no recollection of the creature.

So if a humpback should inexplicably expire on the banks of the River Ouse, our tourists authorities must resist the temptation to pump it full of formaldehyde and launch a York Whale Festival.

IF the film A Cock & Bull Story tempts you to search out an original copy of the book which inspired it, make sure you have a few quid in the bank.

The movie, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, is famously based on the 18th century bestseller Tristram Shandy, as written by Laurence Sterne in Coxwold.

As it happened, London antiquarian bookseller Peter Harrington had a rare edition of the nine volume Tristram Shandy up for grabs at York Book Sale last month.

Out of curiosity a colleague picked up one of the two box slip-cases of the set and was undoing the flap at the back when the dealer told him the item cost £6,000. He put it down again.

It was a first edition of the work, with all but one of the volumes having original covers.

Had all the covers been original the set would have been priced at £35,000.

And that was before Coogan made Tristram Shandy even more bankable.

BIDDING has been less than frantic on our genuine piece of the Flying Scotsman's innards. The auction will end when Friday does, so if you want to secure this piece of locomotive history, you'll need to beat £15 fast (proceeds to the Guardian Angels Appeal).

Updated: 10:45 Wednesday, February 08, 2006