BARELY-perceptible it might be, but the end of the football season has brought more than the biggest disappointment in Middlesbrough FC's history and a classic FA Cup Final.

Less widely recognised is an outstanding example of how much we are now under the thumb of Europe.

Tragically, we seem to take our thralldom pretty much for granted.

Proof is that no voice - at least none that I heard - questioned why it was the EU that determined the TV rights for the Premier League over the next three years.

Think about it. Here is an English football league. Not even a UK one. But even if it covered the UK, why should the TV rights not be matter for the sport itself and the national government? Instead, Parliament played no part in the long negotiations with the European Commission. Risking relegation from their Elysium stadium, past generations of footy fans might well have demanded to know: "What the hell's it got to do with them?" Yet no one today seemed to find the EU's control odd or unacceptable.

The EU's stranglehold on our national life was also sharply revealed when Tony Blair recently promised action to deport all foreign criminals. His Constitutional Affairs Secretary, Lord Falconer, immediately had to qualify the promise. "What the Prime Minister is saying is you need clarity about the circumstances." Well, the clarity is that the European Convention on Human Rights and various EU directives tie the courts' and the Government's hands. Very probably, only change at European level will be able to untie them.

Cause and effect quite otherwise of course, but the ink was barely dry on this column's call for pensions to be relinked to earnings than agreement to do just that was reported between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But look at the small print. 2012 at the earliest (i. e. could be later) and then only if Prudence, aka "the fiscal position", allows.

By then, the pension, already almost £60 adrift of its value had Margaret Thatcher not severed it from earnings in 1980, will have slipped even further towards complete worthlessness.

IHOPE it is not nit picking to point out that Birkdale, Upper Teesdale, the setting of the Hannah Hauxwell TV film Too Long a Winter was not County Durham, as reported in The Northern Echo's obituary of farmer Brian Bainbridge, who appeared in the film. The county council boundary had not then (1973) been moved to take Birkdale from the North Riding into Durham.

To all right-thinking people Birkdale remains Yorkshire, North Riding. For right-thinking people are those who value our historic counties, which in truth weren't abolished by the administrative changes of 1974.

Nor must they be allowed to disappear by default - 1,000 years or more of history sacrificed to a bodged reorganisation that has already been changed and looks certain to be scrapped. Let us stand up - and shout up whenever possible - for the real counties.

THE other day Radio 4 broadcast one of the saddest items I have heard in many a year. The son of Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood's definitive Tarzan, said in an interview that, because of his parents' bitter divorce, his mother would never allow him to watch a Tarzan film.