The Northerner: Keswick Reminder joy and the chimeless ice-cream van

Eggapult and crew (younger son and brother-in-law) immediately after release of egg which hit neighbour's roof. Photograph: Martin Wainwright/guardian.co.uk

In these times of change, when scarcely a political policy remains intact for 24 hours, what bliss it is to turn to the Keswick Reminder's website and find that those immortal words "Full website coming soon" are entering their third year intact.

Ancient that I am, I applaud this Cumbrian defiance of the general march online, much as I also enjoy Tweeting and paddling gently in this email/blog through the regional surf of other Northern media.

I am not mocking; I love the Keswick Reminder and always get it when passing through the town, which I will be doing on 21 April when Workington gets its temporary road bridge open at last. I say "at last" but actually it's been a 72-day engineering wonder, finished more than a month ahead of schedule, according to the town's pages on the website of the Carlisle News and Star.

I'm not alone in Reminder joy, either. I've just discovered a Facebook page called I Love the Keswick Reminder which is full of admissions about how once encountered, the paper is like a drug. Take Roger Clark, who has introduced it to New York, where incredulous pals read a front page story about a pair of gloves disappearing from the bar of the Skiddaw Hotel. They still ask him regularly: "How's the search for them gloves?"

Kim Folwell's a true worshipper too, in Keswick itself. He posts: "I just can't wait until it is released every week, 4pm in the garage! Love it!" I would like to see eventually how IT designers "migrate" the paper's curiously handmade appearance to the net. But there's no rush.

The chimeless ice-cream van

North News bombard me daily with stories and I'll pass on this one, about an ice cream van which has been stopped from sounding its horn in Trumpet Terrace, Cleator. It's an insight into the world of lollies and chimes almost as interesting as Fifty Years of Ice Cream Van Design, a book which I salvaged when the Guardian closed its Manchester library some 25 years ago.

The issue in Cleator, a cosy ex-industrial village on the Coast-to-Coast Walk , based in nearby Egremont, have always used a few beeps on the horn to distinguish their vans from rivals using chimes. The officer who pulled the van over in Trumpet Terrace appears to have been an outsider, according to Cumbria police's own spokesman.

He told North News that many officers were born and bred in West Cumbria, knew the Hartley beep and "would never want to prevent it being used". The firm is hoping that this means an end to the PC's threat of a £30 fine if it happened again.

Ingham's eye view

Hebden Bridge Times

Online, this has the rather pleasing byline Staff Copy, but you can tell it's Sir B by the headlines on archived pieces. Here are a few: Assume what you like about me but don't assume I'm always wrong; The three reasons for my scorn do not make me "irredeemably odious"; and Being boring does indeed have uses.

Ingham was never boring and still isn't, and the piece is a convincing rebuttal of a brave local, who attacked him as a tedious, hypocritical professional Yorkshireman.

While thinking about Hebden Bridge, if you are, pay a visit to its excellent local website HebWeb which gives the Times a run for its money. It's got some particularly good pictures of the massive eggery which goes on in the town over Easter, plus a duck race down the Calder (which Ingham wants to harness for water power, along with its tributaries the Hebden, Colden and (my favourite) the Elphin.

Sleaford Standard

The answer would be dear to those New York friends of the Keswick Reminder's transatlantic reader: this week's front page banner, two lines of bold across five columns of the Sleaford Standard , is "Breeders fear for lives of nine stolen puppies". It's good for a picture, admittedly, although I prefer the one of a miniature goat by a motorway repairs cone in the gallery of readers' pets.

Sleaford is content to be quiet, according to two of its citizens who met our Americans by chance in a London pub, and were astonished to hear that it was on their holiday route. But like Hebden Bridge, it excelled itself at Easter, with an enormous device called an Eggambucopter – a chocolate version of Lincolnshire's air ambulance, which was on show at Hansen's Handmade Chocolates and has been raffled to raise money for the aircraft.

The Eggapult

Martin Wainwright recommends:

I just loved the Canterbury Tales at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Even our Americans, who had been expecting a yawnfest of high culture, came away shaking their heads at the lewdness of the ancient Brits. School parties in the theatre were ecstatic. Check out the daffodils everywhere too; they are fantasic along the A629 along Calderdale – although there's also a dreadful toll of closed-up country pubs.

I've never mentioned a news agency in the Northerner yet, which is very remiss considering how much I've owed over the years to Newcastle's North News. One of my more vivid recollections is guarding its founder Ted Ditchburn's very expensive camera kit from a horde of enterprising urchins on a sink estate. I tried traditional Guardian reasoning but Ted's swatting technique was more effective. I've been in Calder Valley to observe its colourful election – Tony Blair's stepmother-in-law Steph Booth is flying the Labour flag amid endless controversies; so I stopped off this week to have look at the . The paper is a former employer of that truculent old warrior Sir Bernard Ingham, who keeps the cinders of his wrath alight even now, in a column called Ingham's Eye View. My wife Penny and I have just dispatched some American cousins, on holiday here, to another lot of relatives in Sleaford. So, at risk of stretching the North slightly (although the Northerner's done Grantham before now, yea even Stamford), I wondered what would be awaiting them there. We made an Easter machine here in Leeds, called an Eggapult, which I have emailed in picture form to assorted Guardian colleagues, much to their delight and, in the case of my photographer colleague Chris Thomond and his family, alarm. Because they are almost in range of its vast trajectory, they are designing a glider which will be able to retaliate by dropping black puddings on the Wainwright estate. I mention this because in two weeks' time, excellent tacky changes will made to the Northerner to allow lots of jazzy things to be added to the email's design. Ian will explain the changes more thoroughly next week. Eat your heart out, Keswick Reminder.