The two words that everyone noted as missing from David Miliband's headline-grabbing article were “Gordon” and “Brown”. But for me, the two words missing from any of the excitable speculative pieces about Mr Miliband this week were “South” and “Shields”. My native town is a highly individual place. South Shields has not returned a Tory since 1832 so it's as safe as a Labour seat gets - just the place to send young Miliband in 2001.

I left in my early teens, but returned in my gap year to work on The Shields Gazette, when the town was still a grimy industrial centre of ship-repairing and mining, with thriving nightclubs. Forty years on, post-industrially clean, it remains for me a place where the sun always shines from a wide blue sky, with miles of perfect golden sand - none of your pebbly southern rubbish beaches - its inhabitants characterised by inborn scepticism and cynical humour.

True, most people get out as soon as they can, but they keep going back. I have a tryst there shortly with the boy I left behind (who now seems to be often in Moscow, in some top secret oil-company role): we will have lunch at Colman's high-class fish and chippy on Ocean Road, which won The Food Programme award on Radio 4 for best takeaway in 2007.

David Miliband took Tony Blair to Colman's when he came to deliver a lecture in the town. My old Shields friends were furiously scornful of the blandness of Blair's lecture, and that he did not mention Iraq. It is always a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of the northern audience.

I used to think, and at heart I still do, that MPs should have some link with their constituencies and not just use them to climb greasy poles, or polls. An MP should slot comfortably into the demographic profile: it is fitting that Dennis Skinner should bring the grit of the Derbyshire coalfield to the Commons, and that Nicholas Soames should exude the fat prosperity of West Sussex.

Why should northern seats be bestowed on thrusting young London politicians with an eye on the main chance? What had this smooth Oxford graduate and Downing Street apparatchik, raised in a highly political household and schooled in Hampstead (albeit at a comp, not without its rough element), in common with straight-talking Geordies?

But the folks of Shields were long accustomed to having some alien represent them. When I was born the MP was just a figurehead with a peculiar name - J. Chuter Ede. He was Home Secretary in Attlee's Government, so had Cabinet status, a good precedent for Mr Miliband. He also carried on living in Ewell, Surrey - he never bought a house in Shields, nor ventured up there much. When he did, he held court in the Sea Hotel and gave a lofty interview to the Gazette before making his escape to the Home Counties.

Things had changed by the time I met Mr Miliband in South Shields a few days before he was elected in 2001. He was doing his damnedest to earn the local vote even though he was a shoo-in. He'd done his homework and knew about the town's Roman history, the first lifeboat, the names of defunct collieries, the proud Victorian town hall. He had been on the ferry across the no-longer-coaly Tyne, and had been obliged to go line dancing at Whiteleas Social Club. The New Yorker journalist Joe Klein, the author of Primary Colors, was covering his campaign, impressively.

When I asked the locals what Mr Miliband was like they assured me that “He's very, very tall,” and “very young” and “very bright” with “lovely manners”. Very reminiscent of Sedgefield's earliest impressions of T. Blair. Youth and height are among the politician's most effective weapons. (Until George W. Bush beat Al Gore, the US had never voted in the shorter candidate.) When Alastair Campbell chose South Shields's Old Custom House theatre for the first of his road shows, the boy he called “Brains” was in loyal attendance.

The natives no longer regard Miliband as merely “a canny lad” - canny having no connotations of cunning, but simply meaning personable. He ditched the Harry Potter image along with his spectacles. There were no constituents among Jeremy Vine's admiring phoners-in on Thursday. But his Shields house in a quiet residential road is, the Gazette claims, where he wrote his Guardian piece. Any whiff of controversy is totally absent from his fortnightly Gazette columns.

“He's the best thing to have happened to South Shields,” Tom Fennelly, a neighbour and Labour member, assures me. “He has intellect, integrity: he may have been parachuted in, but he does far more than the average MP. The North East must have been a shock to his system but he's often here, out and about, with his wife and family. And he's so shrewd, he always wins the argument.”

Yesterday the town was coping with the flooded aftermath of fierce overnight storms. Its canny MP, heading for sunny Menorca, will have to weather a few storms on his return.

Sir Jonathan Miller gave warning on Tuesday against news of great medical advances reported in the press. He was at Pizza on the Park, where Diana Melly, the widow of George the jazzman, was launching a CD, George Melly First and Last, in aid of the charity For Dementia, which supplied nurses when she was caring for George in his final years.

Melly's brain was slowly deteriorating from dementia - “What's that thing I've got that begins with a D?” - until lung cancer carried him off last summer, “luckily before he got to the stage when he didn't know me”.

Miller was Melly's neighbour when they were part of the trendy NW1 scene of the 1960s, lampooned by Mark Boxer's Times cartoon, The Stringalongs. He graphically recalled George's escapades, including a visit together to Magritte in Brussels. Miller's mother died of Alzheimer's at the age of 53, When Miller became president of the Alzheimer's Society, “it didn't have a name. Nobody knew what to call it”.

But, he told us, there is no prospect of a cure. “Once you get above the neck, you're in trouble. Compared with the brain, the cosmos at large is as simple as a cuckoo clock. The genetics of brain function are way beyond our reach. When newspapers say there's been a breakthrough” [which happened only this week, a day after Miller spoke] don't believe it. Neurological disease is too complicated for ‘break-throughs'.”

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