IT'S the Met Office to blame. Careless talk about England being warmer than the Mediterranean and the North-East collectively casts a clout. Hibernation’s hijacked, Spring sprung.

Almost every seat’s taken as the 10 28 leaves Middlesbrough for Whitby, though – to be fair – about nine of them are filled by the biggest bloke in the Boro. With a senior railcard, the return fare from Darlington’s just £7 50.

It’s Saturday, Whitby Town v Barwell, the day’s destination switched from Penrith because of fears that the match might be waterlogged.

Apparently they’ve found a Roman harbour beneath the pitch, news confirmed by a call from Tow Law secretary Steve Moralee. “How the hell do they get a ship to Penrith?” he asks.

On the train there’s even a queue for the netty. “Dad, I’m bustin’,” says a little lad.

“You’ll just have to bust then,” says dad, neither helpfully nor (as things transpire) wisely.

Observant readers will already have discerned that last Saturday was FA Vase quarter-finals day, South Shields v Newport Pagnell, supposed that the column would have continued on the Railroad to Wembley.

This may be considered a diversion, perhaps even a diversionary tactic, as close as can be to a homophone. For Railroad to Wembley, read Railroad to Whitby, instead.

IT'S exactly 20 years since Whitby themselves won the FA Vase, the first time for 28 years that a Northern League side had been at Wembley and my first season as league chairman.

The start of something big? Positively super-heavyweight.

This season’s programme cover features regular top scorer Paul Pitman – universally Yakka, as in pit yakka – in familiarly exultant mode. The clubhouse walls remain replete with memories of the great day.

“Sea-sea-seasiders” sang thousands of North Yorkshire folk on a day trip from the coast. “Tee-tee-Teessiders,” sang a disoriented member of the Northern League management committee.

At the end of that season they’d been promoted to the Northern Premier League, swiftly moved further upwards from second to top division and, remarkably for a town of just 13,000 people and a club way out on a limb, have survived there.

That they’ve survived financially, says club chairman and retired accountant Graham Manser, is entirely because of the income from the mobile phone company equipment atop every floodlight pylon, masts bristling like the King of Spain’s beard.

Coach costs alone are put at £16,000. Fellow league members include Hednesford and Halesowen (Staffordshire), Stourbridge (Worcestershire), Coalville (Leicestershire) and Workington, which represents a coast-to-coast journey of singular discursiveness.

“It’s not really the Northern Premier League it’s the Midland Premier League, it’s crazy” says Graham 22 years in office. “We’d love another promotion to the National League North. It wouldn’t be so far to travel.”

NOONDAY sun and already there are queues outside Whitby’s more celebrated fish shops. Whitby’s wick wi’ folk, Sandgate and the East side positively jet black with them, Skinner Street excoriating.

Scavenging seagulls salivate, though it’s not they but the pesky pigeons who currently present the town’s biggest problem. The Whitby Gazette splashes (the term may be appropriate) on its front page the story that the train operating company has hired a harris hawk – two shifts a week, answers to Jazz – in an attempt to address the very evident problem at the station.

Memory suggests that they tried the same thing at Frankland prison outside Durham a few years ago – a sort of captors’ raptor – though with no great success. The jail birds were too fly.

Even the most optimistic believe the seaside season to start at Easter. It’s not even Lent. Even the parking meters are inactive until March 1 – Scarborough council could have saved a few old folks’ homes with the income.

The sole chap in a Santa Claus hat is either about six months too late, or he’s heard about the pigeons.

BARWELL'S also in Leicester, four miles from where they fought the Battle of Bosworth Field. The column was there seven years ago, against Whitley Bay in the Vase semi-final first leg, the first 1,000 words incorrigibly devoted to a Tudor history lesson and the last 100 or so to a match report.

Three-one down with five minutes remaining, the Northern League side drew 3-3, winning the second leg with a header in stoppage time.

At Barwell we’d also bumped into a Seahorses’ supporter at Lowestoft for the previous season’s semi-final, locked up before the match for peeing on a police horse’s leg.

They let him out after the buses had gone back, the £107 train fare adding insult to infamy. “I couldn’t hold it in any longer,” he pleaded.

On the 10 28 from Middlesbrough, a little lad would have known exactly what he meant.

THE Seasiders are as wonderfully welcoming as always, though the practice of visitors going home with a box of kippers seems sadly redundant.

This time last season they were third bottom. That they start Saturday’s game third top, hopeful of a promotion play-off place, is attributed chiefly to manager Chris Hardy, tempted towards the end of last season from Guisborough on the other side of the moor.

The club fanzine devotes its cover to him – The Codfather – talks of masterstrokes in the transfer market and of a side playing football as it should be.

The man they call Chardy, possessed of a beard in which Edward Lear might have found two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren – is circumspect. “There’s a long way to go yet,” he says.

The crowd of 285 – £10 adults, £6 codgers – includes Stormin’ Norman Sturman, who played cricket in the Darlington and District League until he was 75 and who, many years earlier, had hung up his football boots at Whitby.

The PA warns that anyone using foul or abusive language will be ejected, a stricture which throughout football appears not to apply to the players.

There, too, is a chap who’d captained Liverton Mines Cricket Club many years ago against Mainsforth in the National Village Cup, the column also in attendance. “They claimed that were put off by a women sunbathing in her garden behind the bowler’s arm,” he recalled.

Neither Liverton Mines nor the Cleveland Cricket League survives.

TOWN score first, lead at half-time, lose 2-1. “I blame no one,” says Chardy, and still plenty of time for the play-offs.

The day’s penultimate train left at half-time, the last one goes at 19 18 – and, says a notice on the station, is “dry” on Saturdays.

No matter that there are those on the return journey through the Esk Valley who wouldn’t be dry if pegged out for a week, It’s been a thoroughly diverting day.