SERIALLY celebrated, Simon Jenkins wrote his final column for The Times last week after 12 years Thundering. Mind, he still only turned out two a week...

"This job is tougher than the northern club circuit," Jenkins wrote by way of valediction, "except that you don't see the punters slipping away into the night."

He's mistaken, of course. For one thing there's nothing tougher than the northern club circuit - except, unforgettably, speaking after midnight at Darlington Rugby Club's annual dinner and promptly being turned into a pumpkin - and for another, it's the punters who keep these columns alive.

Thanks, not least after the weekend's successes, to all those cherished fellow travellers. Dance on...

LAST week's column talked biscuits, and particularly those currant affairs named after the 19th century Italian general Guiseppi Garibaldi and more familiarly known on these shores as squashed flies.

Though we missed the North-East connection, John Robson in Hartlepool was altogether sharper.

The red shirts famously worn by Garibaldi's troops, says John, were made at the former Aysgarth woollen mill in Wensleydale. "It's just one of the legends I picked up from my forebears. The British Army discarded them," he says.

He's right, red rag to a bull neck, of course.

The mill ceased to turn in 1958, these days housing the Yorkshire Carriage Museum - home to fire engines, dog carts, hearses, coaches and a brougham said to be haunted by the ghost of a Scottish gardener. Wheels, as a miller might say, within wheels.

* It is John Robson, however, who sees red over last week's spectacularly solecistic reference to a "beautiful innkeeper's daughter". It is only to be hoped, he adds, that the poor young lady was as good looking as her father.

GRIST again, loading "Aysgarth" and "Garibaldi" onto a search engine might suggest a pretty slender hit-list. Google offered hundreds. Perhaps the most improbable was the website for the Vacation Chamber Orchestra, whose 90-odd North-East venues have included Croft-on-Tees primary school, Grosmont railway station and Aysgarth village hall.

In Europe, they've played Schloss Alteglofsheim in Germany, the Basilica (in Luxembourg) and in Menaggio, Italy, Piazza Garibaldi.

MAYBE there's another North-East link to Garibaldi, and a French connection, too. While researching family history, Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland discovered that his wife's great great uncle was Richard Garibaldi Bell, born in Gateshead in 1861, and that RG Bell's son, Richard Baden Powell Bell - born in Gateshead around 1900 - became world boules champion.

The game afoot, it's possible that there'll be more spotting the boules - maybe even a photograph of the gentleman - next week.

DIFFERENT course, we noted when chewing over cricket teas that Spennymoor CC had once, allegedly, served cabbage sandwiches to the gentlemen of Cockerton.

Not so green, Mary Reavley in Spennymoor writes, charmingly, to insist it wasn't so. "The filling was lettuce, tomato, eggs and scallion. The lady who prepared them will turn in her grave."

ANOTHER runner altogether, last week's column also used the term "All that glisters is not gold" to describe the folly of backing horses with nice names. The phrase, we said, was Shakespearian.

Harry Watson in Darlington disagreed. It came, he said, came from a poem by Thomas Gray - he of the elegiac churchyard - wondrously entitled Ode to a Fat Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.

Harry's after his time. In the Merchant of Venice, written at the end of the 16th century, one of Portia's suitors picks the gold casket and finds inside a skull and a scroll:

All that glisters is not gold,

Often have you heard that told;

Many a man his life hath sold

But my outside to behold'

Gilded tombs do worms enfold...

Thomas Gray was around from 1716-71. Harry nonetheless points to the salutary story of the tub of gold fishes as "a guide to anyone contemplating temptation". Last verse:

From hence, ye Beauties, undeceiv'd,

Know, one false step is ne'er retriev'd,

And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes

And heedless hearts is lawful prize,

Nor all that glisters gold.

Yet more graciously, Harry's subsequent email quotes Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), the English born "first poet of the New World":

This meane and unrefined stuffe of mine

Will make your glistening gold but more to shine.

ALL this talk of opening boxes stirs memories of Take Your Pick, one of ITV's earliest quiz shows.

Hosted by "Quiz inquisitor" Michael Miles, a New Zealander who'd previously worked in Australia and Singapore, it featured 13 boxes - some with booby prizes - and something called the Yes No Interlude in which a guy bonged a gong whenever either word was used.

Memory suggests that the gong bonger was called Alec Dane, doubtless great.

One of the websites adds a footnote that Miles, who earned a massive £20,000 a year for presenting Take Your Pick, suffered from epilepsy, leading viewers to suppose that he was drunk. He died, aged 52, in 1971.

WE'D reminisced a couple of columns back about the once densely housed area around Thornaby railway station, egregiously now known as Teesdale, and - particularly, predictably - about its pubs.

Tony Bonner recalls the Rokeby, the Cleveland and the Bridge Hotel, the Burton, the Bradford Vaults and the Collingwood, where free tripe and carlins were offered on the bar top.

His dad loved his tripe. At last himself allowed into that sanctuary, Tony recalls thinking that he was grown up, so had best try some. It was, he recalls with a still susceptible shiver, the first and last time.

None of this Teesdale tripe, he also remembers the name by which the area was known to one and all. They called it "Down below the railway."

OTHER readers simply return stuff whence it came. Janet Murrell in Durham sends a holiday ad headed "Spain, France, Andorra and the Pyrenees" in which the price includes coach travel, b&b and a day at the England v Australia test match.

Perhaps, says Janet, someone should have a word with air traffic control.

Clive Sledger in Aldbrought St John, near Richmond, clicks onto an ad for a Darlington company offering computers with all manner of bells and whistles including a "16-speed DVD wrighter".

Everything, adds Clive, except a spell-check.

FINALLY back to biscuits, and a note from the Darlington reader who prefers simply to be known as That Bloody Woman and who recently came across the Latin phrase "Sic friat crustulum."

It means "That's how the cookie crumbles." With help from the greatest northern club of all, we break bread again next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk

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Published: ??/??/2004