IT IS to be a round Britain column. Wokingham will again intrude, and Harlow, and places closer to home and heart like - say - Newton Aycliffe. The e-mail menopause, ineffable and inescapable, is in part to blame. One of the Ludds no longer, Gadfly has finally dropped the mental shilling in the meter.

First, however, a question via the white man's speaking machine from John Ingham in Lanchester, Co Durham: which well known London district has six successive consonants in its single-word name?

An answer, before disorientation - or disconnection - sets in, shortly before the foot of the column.

THEN to that bright elusive butterfly the comma, briefly sighted in last week's column and periodically punctuating the thereafter.

(Elusive Butterfly, more gentle readers will recall, was the title of a rather nice song which in successive weeks in 1966 reached number five for Bob Lind, who was American, and Val Doonican, who wasn't. Whatever became of Bob Lind, more on the Irish rocker elsewhere.)

The comma, we said, was listed on information boards along the many-splendoured Great Aycliffe Way - though none of our dictionaries defined it as a butterfly. Was it, we'd wantonly wondered, the case of a council painter who got full marks for sign writing but precious few for dictation?

Lepidopterists, and folk with butterfly books, flew to his defence. Wilf Hylton from Scarborough, a Yuri Gagarin in the column's cyberspace, had confirmed before breakfast that it was indeed an orange and brown butterfly with a white, comma shaped mark on the underside of its wing. Others suggest that the bright elusive lepidopteron is not usually seen in the North-East - rather below a line from the Mersey to the Wash - and may simply have been visiting relatives in Newton Aycliffe. Thanks to Yorkshire Game's 2000 calendar for the photograph and to Jon Smith in Barningham, Dorothy Stevens in Peterlee, former biology teacher Janet McCrickard in Darlington, Tom Purvis in Sunderland, Sylvia and Michael Graham in Willington and June Hill somewhere out in the ether a short biography follows. The comma is an expert in disguise, has ragged wings, likes nothing better than a bit bramble, has a caterpillar that looks like bird droppings and is itself nothing much to write home about. This one could be a long player.

JOHN Ingham, aforesaid, once lived in a pub in Harlow, Essex, its in-depth nautical theme potentially torpedoed when planners decided that the town's pubs should all be named after butterflies.

Finally it was called The Shark - another butterfly, of course. So, adds Tom Purvis, are the Mother Shipton, the chimney sweeper ("a plain black moth") and Blair's Shoulder Knot - "said to be an immigrant from Europe".

But what about the Harlow hostelry at the time known as a haunt of - shall we say - meretricious women? They renamed it The Painted Lady.

ANOTHER little amble took us for the first time to Bradbury, the pleasant hamlet near Sedgefield from which the A1/A689 interchange usually takes its name. Once it had a little railway station - 21 minutes to Darlington, 31 to Durham, five stopping trains a day - now there's little more than an elderly Methodist chapel, a handful of houses and a noticeboard advising further exploration. "Bradbury and the Isles," it says, surprisingly. We'd heard of Aygyll and the Isles (didn't they have a particularly wayward bishop?) but never Bradbury. About which isles are we talking? More startling yet, the board asserts that Roman longboats docked at Bradbury - the east coast railway line not then having been imagined - having presumably navigated the uncharted waters of the humble River Skerne.

Sunderland docks certainly, Middridge docks legendarily, but did the Romans really tie up at Bradbury, did they have longboats at all and - like the best of us - wouldn't they have been better off walking?

BACK in Newton Aycliffe, Dr Ann Marshall has mobile phones coming (as it were) out of her ears.

She herself has five unused and unconnected phones in a box. Her mum has another two.

"If we have seven mobile phones going spare in one household, all in first class working condition, others - especially businesses - must be in the same position," she writes.

"When the contract has been over for a year, the phone becomes your own property - would it be possible for them to be of use to charities? It always seems a shame to throw them into the dustbin."

Could anyone use them, or recycle them? What's the collective noun - a silence, perhaps - for mobile phones past their cell-by?

Ideas welcomed. Going spare, indeed.

BERKS as bad as its bite, the footnote to last week's column pondered the mystery of why the single word "Wokingham" had appeared in the pocket diary for July 31.

Ray Gibbon has no idea, either, but reckons it a pleasant town surrounded by gentle countryside and with so much work going begging that you can't see through the Jobcentre window for situations vacant cards. "There's the usual snag. The price of housing is unbelievable," writes Ray, from Witton Gilbert, near Durham.

The puzzle has been solved by Tony Day from Middlesbrough, and even before his 10p ran out. The hirsute Tony is a cricket nut, known on the North-East circuit as Jesus. Wokingham, he points out, is the home town of a particularly bibulous touring team whom we encountered at Redcar last season. July 31 was the date of their thirstily awaited return.

AND FINALLY...back to Harlow, and to one of history's greatest insults. At a Hollywood party, the vampish actress Jean Harlow approached Margot, Lady Asquith.

"Why, you're Mar-gott Asquith, aren't you?" said the actress.

"No my dear, I am Mar-go Asquith" replied her ladyship. "The 't' is silent, as in Harlow."

It wouldn't do to trade insults, of course, not even by eeeh-I-never mail and that consonant area of London is, exclusively, Knightsbridge