AND anyone who has ever been to a Welcome to Yorkshire annual conference – think Oscars but with more regional produce cooking demonstrations – will know that organising a poxy bike race is well within their capabilities.

It’s good to recycle so there’s a paragraph that was chopped off the end of last week’s column which I’ve reused.

A line about the omnipotence of Upper Dales county councillor John Blackie was also removed. Maybe it was the man himself exercising his powers.

It’s my own fault. I got carried away with talk of the cat and didn’t realise I’d written a short novel. To avoid pay-off lines being removed in future, I’ve decided to put any potentially amusing bits at the start so they will hopefully avoid the sub-editor’s delete button.

Rather than reach a crescendo of interestingness, the column will gradually become duller and duller until it finishes with an anecdote about the price of nappies and an unstressed syllable. Or I could just write the correct number of words, I suppose.

Returning to the theme of animals, I saw a red kite above the tank road towards Catterick the other day. If you were playing raptor Top Trumps, it would probably lose on rarity, size and deadliness to the osprey seen by Nick Morgan, who writes the D&S birdwatching column, but I was pleased with the sighting nonetheless.

I was equally happy to see a bright-eyed polecat plodding beside the road outside Leyburn one evening.

It took me back to my own ferrets – not literally, obviously – which spent far more time roaming about the Dales after Houdini-like escape acts than they ever did actually in their cages.

The sighting came as two pet ferrets made the national news when they became trapped on rocks off the Northumberland coast and had to be rescued by a lifeboat crew.

It’s not clear what the ferrets were doing on the rocks, although I reckon they were probably rock pooling as it’s been too cold for sunbathing this week.