SINCE the Birthday Honours always coincide with a week’s holiday, belated congratulations to our old friend Roy Simpson MBE – “services to cricket and the community.”

Active in both, Roy may nonetheless be best known to these columns’ readers as founder chairman of the World Egg Jarping Association, in which contestants have been going head to head since 1984.

“I was a bit surprised they didn’t mention that one,” he admits.

He first played cricket for Peterlee in 1965, remembers turning out on World Cup day the following year – “I took 7-27” – and is now chairman of the Durham Cricket League and one of its umpires.

His wife Cynthia has been making Peterlee’s teas for 50 years. “It’s her who deserves the medal, really,” says Roy.

Twenty years a JP, he’s also been governors’ chairman at Shotton Hall Academy for 25 – a banner outside the school acknowledging their delight at his honour.

Everything it’s cracked up to be, the egg jarping championship has 23 rules, mostly warning against skulduggery. Outlawed practices include dipping or immersing eggs in beer, brushing with nail varnish, smearing with hair cream and warming on the radiator.

Roy even got to discuss it all on the Richard and Judy Show, and to have a sort of dunsh macabre (natives will understand) with Meatloaf.

The papers while we were away have also been further occupied with the debate over whether chess and bridge are games or sports, sports men insisting that the brain is a muscle.

And egg jarping? “You should see the physical exertion,” says the new Member of the Most Noble Order. “It’s a sport, definitely.”

George Courtney, whose MBE for services to football came a quarter of a century ago, was honoured again last week.

George, Spennymoor lad and proud of it, was guest at a dinner hosted by the Football League to mark a lifetime’s achievement in the game. The programme recalled that his first match in the middle had been on Cockton Hill recreation ground in Bishop Auckland.

A public footpath ran across the pitch. “Every few minutes I’d be stopping the game to let a little old lady across with her shopping bags,” he once told the column. “I’d re-start with a dropped ball. That was the correct decision.”

As the programme also observed, young Courtney progressed rather more quickly than the little old lady. At 74, he still referees whenever there’s not a game of golf.

Shildon FC, where lies the column’s own lifetime allegiance, marks its 125th anniversary with a dinner – special guest Jeff Stelling – on Saturday. The waiting list for tickets stretches halfway down Dean Street.

Much more humbly, I was up there myself on Monday evening for a 30-minute interview with Made in Tyne and Wear, the internet-based television channel.

It’ll be one of a series of six, others including Malcolm Macdonald and Julio Arca, the former Sunderland player who now happily swims with the Willow Pond in the Over 40s League.

“No offence,” said the reporter, “but we have to have at least someone who the viewers will have heard of.”

Grounds for considerable pleasure, a package arrives from Australia. It’s coffee farmed down under by Ralph Ord, Crook lad who was both manager of Wearhead United and of the Eastgate leisure centre, nearby.

Coffee isn’t his principal growth industry, however. The former Crook and District League footballer is now Head of Operations for the 2018 Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast. More of the golden touch ere long.

Alan Archbold, one of those delightful people whose quirky contributions have for so long supported and enriched these columns, has died. He was 70.

A talented schoolboy athlete, Alan passed on that ability to his son Ian – now in Newton Aycliffe – who became one of the region’s top middle distance men and still competes.

He himself lived in East Boldon, near Sunderland, knew many of the city’s pubs, had a marvellous eye for an oddity.

Who else might have spotted that when the Sheffield derby ended 1-1 in 2000 the scorers were Ford and Hendon – both areas of Sunderland – or that the Echo’s report of the 2002 European athletics championships recorded that Britain had won eight medals, “one gold, two silver and four bronze.”

“Your man must have gone to a better school than I did,” said Alan.

Much more about a greatly valued reader in the column next Tuesday.

….and finally, the only cricketer to have captained England in ten or more tests but never finished on the winning team in any of them (Backtrack, June 11) was Sir Ian Botham, the Squire of Ravensworth. Soon, it’s reported, his embryonic Beefy’s restaurant chain will open in Durham.

Still at the helm, readers are today invited to name the England football captain whose last three clubs were Hibernian, Millwall and Leyton Orient.

With much more about Shildon’s celebrations, the column returns next week.