HANDSWORTH Parramore sounds like a particularly unscrupulous landlord in a Charlotte Bronte novel but is, in fact, a football club whose senior side plays in Worksop and the other 30-odd teams 20 miles away in Sheffield.

They’re drawn at home to Shildon in the FA Vase. The Railroad to Wembley hasn’t yet crossed Croft bridge, ten past nine, when the Lorelei trolleys, tempting, down the aisle.

The elder bairn, Yorkshire by birth but Shildon by adoption, declines the first of the day. “I have to look after myself,” he says, unexpectedly.

That morning’s paper has a story on a church youth group from Shildon who’ve been to the Commons in protest at the town’s perceived relentless decline.

There’s no bank and will soon be no supermarket, just a great girth of fast food joints. Shildon, says the paper authoritatively, has more takeaways per head than anywhere else in Co Durham.

The most damning indictment of all may be that the town doesn’t even have a Wetherspoons (or Witherspoons as the drinking classes insist upon calling them). Everywhere has a Wetherspoons, for heaven’s sake.

The younger bairn, railroading towards Worksop from the opposite direction, has a piece on the BBC website that morning about a Scots lassie who’s visited 990 Wetherspoons, though the chain currently links just 936.

“There are one or two where you might think ‘I’m not sure’ but most of them are fine,” she says.

For Shildon, chance would be a fine thing. There’s a Costa Coffee, though.

WORKSOP, locally pronounced Wuksup, is on the edge of Sherwood Forest in north Nottinghamshire. It’s home to Lee Westwood, Graham Taylor, Donald Pleasance and George Best, described on Wikipedia as “a goalkeeper with Blackpool.”

It’s also the only place in Britain that makes Oxo – Worksop’s from good stock – though it’s the Good Beer Guide which proves more alluring. There are four entries, two within a cockstride of the station and a third, the Mallard, squarely on platform 2.

The Mallard, by great good fortune, is in the middle of a beer festival. The elder bairn declines a Russian Imperial Stout (7.5 per cent abv) and settles for something called Little Tick, barely half the strength.

“I still have to look after myself,” he says. It’s 11.30am.

The Mallard also has a collection of metal railway signs. There’s the usual grim warning about trespassing on the London and North Eastern, a plate advising that the truck contained “Non common spares from Horwich” – what’s so exclusive about Horwich? – and a couple which declare that the vehicle was “Re-bodied in Shildon.”

Then again, weren’t we all?

It’s Hallowe’en, fright night. Shildon are joint favourites to lift the Vase, but Handsworth Parramore have lost just once all season. Do they scare us? Nah.

WORKSOP’S also mentioned in Matthew Engel’s marvellous Engel’s England, a troubadour tour of the original 39 counties. It’s the book, it may be recalled, in which he spent a memorable night at Wheatley Hill dogs.

In Worksop, he was particularly taken by Mr Straw’s House, a National Trust property in which the furnishings are unchanged since the 1930s. The plan to visit is derailed by the Mallard.

Engel also recalls Co Durham’s dominance of the old FA Amateur Cup, quoting me as Northern League chairman. “Of course it wasn’t amateur. The notion was ludicrous. A lot of the players came over from Manchester twice a week and they didn’t do that because they liked the air. Everyone knew it was shamateur.

“There was a maximum wage in the professional game and you could do very well as an amateur.”

It is not possible to claim that I was misquoted.

THOUGH they hope eventually to join their brethren in Sheffield, HP play on Worksop Town’s ground. Perhaps because they are regarded as cuckoos in the nest, the Worksop Guardian affords them not so much as a paragraph, though Town get four pages. There’s a story about Lee Westwood in Turkey and even a page about a rugby match, 15-15 appropriately, at Guisborough.

“A proper old ground,” say the travelling fraternity of Wuksup, a slightly surprising claim for a stadium built in 1992 and which, however welcoming, is pretty much football’s equivalent of an Airfix kit.

Handsworth Parramore play in the Northern Counties East League – that of Pickering, Parkgate and Pontefract Collieries – and are managed by Peter Duffield, a much-travelled Boro boy who made 50-odd appearances for Darlington.

Shildon are favourites, odds tumbling from 4-6 to 1-2 before the first pint is quaffed. Inexplicably coupled with money on West Ham, the bairns invest more in one bet than their caffy-hearted father has wagered in a lifetime.

The crowd’s 120, more than half from Shildon. There’s also a dog called Ava – “same as Ava Gardner,” says her owner – which wears a Railwaymen scarf and has never seen Shildon lose a cup tie.

Banners bank behind the bottom goal – there’s even one from the South Uist branch of the supporters club – whilst the travelling support sings that they all live at the top of Eldon Bank, which seems unlikely, not least because it’s where the Aged Miners Homes are.

John Atkinson, the club’s magnificently indomitable president, recalls that he played football at the top of Eldon Bank for Shildon All Saints. “It was quite a long time ago,” he adds.

The match ebbs and flows, stands 3-3 after 90 minutes. In extra time, Shildon have a man dismissed for reasons not at once obvious. That he is follically challenged is among the kindest comments flung fecklessly towards the red card referee.

“I’m off for some more chips and gravy,” mutters a travelling fan, clearly fearing the worst.

HP score twice more, the visitors’ last-kick penalty insufficient to prevent a fall at the first hurdle. Ava’s tail’s between her legs, the rest of us more inclined to kick the cat.

Morosely we head back to the Mallard: the elder bairn falling forlornly into the arms of a Stout Imperial Russian.

By no means for the first time for us Shildon supporters, it has been a great day, marred only by the match.