OFTEN alliteratively, bus companies these days like to brand their routes – the Durham Dawdler, or whatever. The No 34 from Richmond to Darlington should be called the Use It or Lose It.

Discursively, it ambles through numerous villages around Scorton before a final thrash up the motorway. Last Saturday’s first of the day has but three passengers, all of us with bus passes and all headed for football. Only the column, of course, is subsequently on the Railroad to Wembley.

As anticipated, the 9.40 Transpennine is conversely, chaotically, crowded. Again there is standing room only, the slightly surprising thing that 90 per cent of fellow passengers appear to be youngish women and that 100 per cent of the 90 per cent to be clucking simultaneously.

Transpennine may host more hen parties than Christmas at Readylay.

It’s necessary to change at Leeds, where a large notice warns to keep off the track. The track, presumably, is for the overflow.

WE'RE headed for Chorlton-cum-Hardy, four or five miles south-west of Manchester city centre and, somewhat surprisingly, by the River Mersey. That it was once part of the Kingdom of Northumbria may also be unexpected.

It’s the sort of place which journalists term leafy, even when the leaves are in great sodden heaps on the pavement. Reviewing the area’s attractions back in 2006, The Guardian claimed that the local newsagent sold more copies of their publication than any paper shop outside London. It was once the Manchester Guardian, after all.

“It’s genuinely all co-operative grocers, Bush-baiters and lesbian single mothers,” the piece added, perhaps with a touch of self-mockery.

For those whose preferred reading is the Good Beer Guide, it’s impossible not to notice that Chorlton – as its friends know it – has no fewer than eight entries.

None of them is the Chorlton Tap, a tremendous place over the road from the Metrolink station, to which we adjourn for a livener and stay for two hours. Four of us have met in Manchester, the others arrived from Huddersfield, Scunthorpe and somewhere near the Ballspond Road. Three southerners and a Co Durham lad.

One of them recalls that, in 1964, the blues singer Muddy Waters headlined a Granada TV show – something about the Glory Train – filmed around those same tracks at Chorlton and still found easily on the internet.

What formerly had been Whalley Range station had been transformed into Chorltonville, somewhere in the American deep south. The trains had gained cow catchers, the platform the obligatory guy going nowhere in a rocking chair.

Other performers included Bonnie McGhee, Cousin Joe and Sister Rosetta Tharpe who, seeing the accustomed downpour, asked to change her opening number to Didn’t It Rain.

The weather’s distinctly Mancunian as we head from pub to ground. “I bet you didn’t known that Muddy Waters’s real name was Mackinley Morganfield,” says one of the party.

As probably they say in the Chorlton Tap, anything that turns you on.

WEST Didsbury and Chorlton are playing West Auckland, FA Vase, a national competition in which the top seven in the betting are all Ebac Northern League sides. This one proves confusing. For the first 15 minutes, the southerners wrongly assume the team in white to be the visitors.

“We just heard people shouting ‘Come on West’,” they plead.

Our boys are managed by Gary Forrest, a good guy who two seasons ago guided Shildon to a treble and who’d also been in the papers last Wednesday.

Gary’s chairman of the Washington-based High Street Group, property and financial services companies which announced a £26m annual profit – “highly encouraging,” said the chairman, as well he might.

Other top executives include Phil Brumwell – more than 200 games for Darlington in the 1990s – Bishop Auckland manager Colin Myers and Paul Buzzeo, a familiar figure around the Northern League.

High Street now aim yet higher. Hadrian’s Point, an 82-metre apartment block, will become (by some way) Newcastle’s tallest building.

How on earth does the group chairman find the time to run a football team? “I dunno,” says West Auckland general manager Stuart Alderson, “but he’s damn good at that, too.”

CHORLTON'S former residents include the aviators Alcock and Brown, the Bee Gees, Freddie Garitty and Doris Speed, great matriarch of the Rovers Return. George Best, notes Wikipedia, lodged “on and off” for ten years in Aycliffe Avenue.

It recalls the little leprechaun’s appearance at the Barnes Hotel in Sunderland, exactly 30 years ago, helping a support fund for a 13-year-old boy from Chester-le-Street, terribly injured in a road accident.

Funds had further been boosted by a book on whether George would show up at all. “Hands up if you didn’t think I’d be here,” he began, after breezing in from the airport. His own hand joined them.

He was brilliant, inevitably asked where it all went wrong. Besty took another swig of Moet and Chandon. “Because I like getting p****d”, he said.

He also gave £100 towards the fund and, in the cocktail bar about 3am, decided that he would pay a visit later that day to the lad’s special school outside Durham.

“You can’t, you have to be somewhere down south,” said his minder.

“Wanna bet?” said George.

No question that he’d turn up for that one, the kids utterly enthralled and the only condition – his condition – that the story appeared only in the Backtrack column.

“When the definitive George Best story comes to be written,” the column concluded, “it’s to be hoped that they don’t miss out the good bits.”

A COACH load of West Auckland supporters has followed the team over the top, few of them likely to be Guardian readers. Back in the day, it’s reckoned, West had more Nig-Nog Club members per head than anywhere in the North-East.

West Didsbury play in the North West Counties League, that of that of Bootle, Barnton and Burscough. Pete Lewis, their PA man, spent formative years in St Helen’s Auckland, sang and played guitar, was the turn at West Auckland workmen’s when not even old enough to drink there.

The weather remains Mancunian, the corner flags so greatly gusting towards the horizontal that one of our number – he from the Ballspond Road, the one who’d been on the vodka and Red Bulls at 9.30am – decides to hold one up while a player takes a corner.

The ref looks bemused. “That’ll do nicely,” he says.

At half-time it’s goalless; after 75 minutes West Auckland are two up. One or two of the home supporters are employing language they’d never have read in The Guardian, at least not without asterisks.

Seeking solace, one of them recalls a Vase match against Morpeth two seasons ago when the Ebac Northern League side led 4-0 at half-time but in which West Didsbury scored a 90th minute equaliser.

What happened next? “Your lot went down the other end and scored the winner,” he says.

This one ends 3-0. The Guardian has not so much as a mention.