GREAT, thanks for that. After getting a kicking on last week’s D&S letters page, I will be forever be known to the kids as Whinging Willis.

“Please can you tidy your room.”

“What’s that, whinger.”

“Please can you stop sniffing glue and drinking turps.”

“Are you still whinging?”

I’m providing a public service, I swear. I’m sucking out the cynicism venom then spitting it into the River Wensleydale before anyone else gets poisoned.

In this capacity, I spoke to one Hawes trader this week who said the Tour had been a “disaster” for them. Two weeks of preparations and shed loads of outlay only for people to arrive, watch the race and then leave without spending any cash.

They asked not to be named for fear of being lynched for being a Tour de France heretic.

Being a responsible citizen, I of course tarred and feathered the trader for expressing negative sentiments on the big bike race. Does anyone up Walden still have a ducking stool? Myself and the business person could take it in turns to dunk each other in the river, which this week turned even more chocolatey brown than usual.

Rather than the next bold marketing ploy from Welcome to Yorkshire, it was caused by an avalanche on Little and Great Whernside. A cloudburst on top of the hills caused peat to pour into the River Cover and then the River Urgh.

Apparently, Great Whernside is not actually as high as Whernside, a hill a few miles away. I’m not saying Great Whernside is a mere hummock, but Whernside is definitely greater. Although Little Whernside is smaller than both the others. Clearly the ancestors were too busy fighting off wolves to worry about giving different, and accurate, names to the hills.

Few hills have particularly imaginative names, it has to be said. Simon Fell on Ingleborough for example. It is not clear why Simon Fell is called Simon Fell, although I don’t think it has anything to do with Simon Fell, the Dewsbury-born bassist and composer primarily known as a free improviser. Simon’s Seat near Bolton Abbey is believed to be named after a baby found on the hill and brought up by local shepherds. The child was called Simon Amangham. That has to be a wind up, right?