Basic relations between the distributions of hitting, occupation and inverse local times of a one-dimensional diffusion process $X$, first discussed by It\^o and McKean, are reviewed from the perspectives of martingale calculus and excursion theory. These relations, and the technique of conditioning on $L_T^y$, the local time of $X$ at level $y$ before a suitable random time $T$, yield formulae for the joint Laplace transform of $L_T^y$ and the times spent by $X$ above and below level $y$ up to time $T$.