Sam Northeast is starting to make a name for himself. The 13-year-old, reports The Observer, has this season scored 11 centuries in 19 innings for his school team in Broadstairs, Kent, with an average of 291.

It's a name we'd not previously stumbled across, and with pretty good reason. Though almost 300 adults in England and Wales share the surname, there is - incredibly - not a single Northeast in the North-East.

There's a Harold, a Herbert and even a Hyacinth Northeast, an Albert, an Aileen, umpteen Alans but not a single Geordie. Frantically throwing coal on the search engine, column stalwarts John and Lynn Briggs even discover a Gutter P Northeast in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, though (perhaps fortunately in the circumstances) there is no clue to what the P might stand for.

There are Northeasts throughout the south, a colony domiciled in Devizes, several scattered around Wales and a couple in Chester, which is definitely north-west.

The closest to home, however, is Anne Northeast, who got as far as a flat in Wakefield and seems to have considered it quite far enough.

Though The Observer reckons the origin Scandinavian, the Briggs' researches suggest that the Northeast family has its roots in the "ancient territories of England" in the 11th and 12th centuries. They first appeared on medieval registers in Yorkshire.

The family coat of arms featured three martlets, or legless birds. "They also branched out into other territories and holdings, before taking the long voyage to the new world," the history adds.

Now, alas, they seem to have flown the nest forever.

IF there are no Mr Northeasts, who might best be acclaimed Mr North-East? (North-East, it should be noted, is the preferred form around here. Regions like south-west take lower case; some are lucky to get that.)

The honour should be open to those alive or dead. Railwaymen clamour for inclusion, politicians may reasonably be vetoed though Ellen Wilkinson comes closest.

If St Cuthbert narrowly be excluded, it comes down to a ballot between Bede - who, wise man, rarely travelled beyond Northumbria - and Sir Bobby Robson, who's been about a bit further.

Heart and head both suggest that Bede of Jarrow deserves the accolade of history's Mr North-East. Readers may think differently.

Among other matters under discussion in the pub has been what happened to Donna Douglas, otherwise the tomboy Elly May Clampett in the celebrated sixties series The Beverley Hillbillies.

She was the woman who did more for blue jeans in six months than cowboys did in 100 years, though in competition with Granny and Miss Drysdale it didn't take much to be a stunner by the cee-ment pond.

Beyond doubt she is alive, well, gospel singing and available for "grand openings", though accounts of her birth - as Doris Smith - range from 1933 to 1939.

At least two of the pub lads independently attest that in the 1960s Donna was kebabbed in a blizzard whilst driving alone across the North Yorkshire Moors and was half frozen to death when rescued.

The Echo archives have nothing of it, which is by no means conclusive, though there's a Granada Television publicity picture of her in The Big Night Out from Butlin's at Filey - with Ken Platt, Sheila Buxton and Ronnie Carroll - in September 1962.

It could hardly have been on the way from Filey, however, since not even the North Yorkshire moors had blizzards in September.

Can anyone dig it out?

Weird'ale News, the chatty newsletter of the Wear Valley sub-branch of CAMRA, reports without comment that in 1422 the Masters of the Brewers Company were fined and imprisoned for keeping the price of beer too high - after a complaint by Dick Whittington, a former Lord Mayor of London.

Over 100 years later, another Lord Mayor appointed "hop searchers" to seize and burn any hops they found to be "not wholesome for man's body".

In 2003, some things never change.

Though barely a mile over the rope, we were in Gretna long enough on Saturday to buy a mutton pie and a copy of The Scotsman.

"Big Brother final brings Orkney to a standstill" screamed a huge headline above a picture of Cameron Stout, the 32-year-old victor in the latest sleep-over.

He is a fish dealer, virgin and Christian from Stromness, where a large banner urging "Go, Cameron go" hangs outside the Stromness Hotel. Tourist enquiries have rocketed, Orkney's cows have had Channel 4 installed in the milking parlour, "Cameron-mania" is said to have swept the island.

Stuart Laundy, the new editor of The Orcadian - Orkney's weekly newspaper - is from Ingleton, near Darlington. Two days before it was discovered that someone really was watching Big Brother, we'd booked an interview and three nights in the Stromness Hotel.

Unless all this nonsense has abated by early September, we'll be on the first ferry home again.

The past two columns have been chewing on about lettuce. It grows on Kevin O'Beirne, anyway.

Pliny the Elder, we said last week, considered lettuce to have "special properties" which included checking sexual appetite, cooling a fevered body and inducing sleep. Kevin, in Sunderland, knows a man who did as the Romans did.

His mate on Tynemouth Sunday market not only sells legal hemp products - and plans a shop with more of the same in Chester-le-Street - but offers packets of "wild lettuce" seed, too.

"I understand that the effects are 'relaxing', so as Pliny supposed, you might well get a good night's sleep," says Kevin.

Mind, he adds, he's unsure if the Romans ate it or (as the senior Pliny doubtless observed) put it in their pipe and smoked it....

....and finally, Friday marks Yorkshire Day - doubtless splendidly to be celebrated in the Rose and Crown at Mickleton (Co Durham) by the column's dear old friend Jack Robinson and by Hannah Hauxwell, his 32nd cousin twice or three times removed.

Chambers Dictionary defines a "tyke" as a dog, cur or rough mannered fellow or alternatively as a Yorkshireman, without hint as to whether the definitions are synonymous.

Last shovelful on the search engine, however, John Briggs discovers that not only are there no Northeasts between Tees and Tweed, there are no Tykes in Yorkshire, either.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.html