THE Railroad to Wembley piece on Newport Pagnell (Backtrack, February 2) prompted Brian Kirkbride to suppose that the 6-inch guns of HMS Belfast, now a museum ship moored on the Thames, are aimed permanently at Newport Pagnell services on the M1. As the Royal Navy might never say, he was slightly off target.

Belfast’s heavy artillery is actually pinpointed towards London Gateway services, formerly Scratchwood, said to be a place of “quotidian monotony” and a little further south. It’s been that way since Belfast moored in the Pool of London in 1971.

Several other readers, starting with Garry Gibson at 6 14am, raised an eyebrow at the suggestion in the same account that “queuing” was an eight-letter word with five consecutive vowels. Cue confusion.

“’Queuing’ is a seven-letter word with four consecutive vowels,” writes Garry, inarguably. Bob Jones wondered if council cuts were to blame, Jon Smith’s contentious cat offered “miaoued” as a five-vowel alternative.

It should have read “queueing.” Chambers Dictionary (and the computer’s capricious spellcheck) allow both.

THE Newport Pagnell chronicle also supposed that the author George Orwell’s Utopian pub was The Moon and Sixpence. That was Somerset Maugham as Jon Smith – again – patiently points out. Orwell’s idyll was The Moon Under Water.

His vision appeared in the Evening Standard 71 years ago today – a pub, he said where folk went as much for the conversation as for the beer, where there were open fires and motherly barmaids, where it was always quiet enough to talk, where there was no radio or piano “and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions, the singing is of a decorous kind.”

Everything, Orwell added, had the “solid, comfortable ugliness of the 19th century – and, save for the ugliness, might have been talking about the wonderful Victoria in Durham, handsomely opened in 1899 and pretty much unchanged ever since.

STUFF on Newton Aycliffe (say) rarely courts correspondence like that on Newport Pagnell. Why, we’d wondered, is the green-and-white hooped football team known as the Swans?

A reader in Darlington wonders if it’s a genuflection to the Swan Revived, a famed pub thereabouts known simply as the Swan until it burned to the ground in 1880 and once a resting place for Samuel Pepys.

Brian Dixon, raised in London but also long in Darlington, ventures a link to the Great Ouse, the river which flows nearby. Near his childhood home was Walton-on-Thames, mooring point of Walton and Hersham, nicknamed the Swans.

A bit further up-river was Staines, base of Staines Town – aka the Swans. Neither played in all-white, says Brian, who also wonders if any team’s called the Geese.

The column has a doubtless fanciful theory that Newport Pagnell’s moniker may owe something to the presence of Santander’s UK headquarters at Milton Keynes, just across the M1. The swan logos are very similar, though the programme makes no acknowledgment of sponsorship.

Or it might just be swan-upmanship.

SHILDON staged the Ebac Northern League’s inaugural inter-club football quiz, won by Willington on a tie-break. The most questionable thing of all was that the hosts asked me to make up the numbers. Not bad on Northern League, woeful amid the bigger boys, I did at least know how many English managers have won the Premier League. None.

JOHN Dawson, king of the ground hoppers, completed his Isthmian League set the other day – save for Guernsey, which is a bit difficult on a bus pass.

The last stop was at Hendon (they of the police college) v Sudbury, proceedings interrupted in the 89th minute when all hell broke loose on the pitch. The game finally restarted, all hell broke loose again 30 seconds later. Match abandoned after 90 minutes.

There are ground hoppers who insist that abandoned matches don’t count. “Blow that,” says the retired Hartlepool postman. “I’m never going back there again.”

The approach may be slightly different from that of Russell Henderson, on our quiz team at Shildon, who’s close to the 92 and also enjoys ticking off foreign grounds. They include the Nou Camp at Barcelona, where instead of a football match he discovered 20,000 JWs at a convention. “It counts,” says Russ.

THE note two weeks ago on the passing of former Durham cricketer Peter Kippax, lovely man, reminded Don Clarke of the Gillette Cup game against Nottinghamshire in which Kippy and Wasim Raja operated in tandem – “two leg spinners bowling together, the purists in raptures.” Kippax bagged 3-25 off 12 overs, Wasim 2-50. Malcolm Dunstone was just grateful for the term leggie’s legerdemain. “It conjures up great mystery,” says Malcolm. So did Kippy.

WE also learn with much sadness of the passing of Mary Watson, widow of Kip Watson who founded and for so long sustained the Over 40s League and who filled copious column inches. Mary was lovely, her funeral at 10 15am tomorrow at St Andrew’s church in Fulwell, Sunderland.

...AND finally, last week’s column sought the identity of three cricketers who’d each played more than 100 tests but failed to total 1,000 runs.

They were Courtney Walsh (132 tests, 936 runs averaging 7.54), the South African quickie Makhaya Ntini (101 tests, 699 runs, average 9.84) and the Aussie Glenn McGrath who, despite once hitting 61, accumulated a mere 641 runs in 124 tests at 7.36.

That they claimed 510, 390 and 563 wickets respectively ensured that they were anything but tail-end Charlies.

Today, one purloined from the quiz at last Friday’s sportsmen’s evening at Tindale Crescent club: who’s the only footballer to have played for both Liverpool and both Manchester clubs (and one in the North-East, an’ all)?

Similarly peripatetic, the column returns next week.