WHOEVER it was first observed that today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapping had clearly been reading these columns.

So does 67-year-old Harry Bailey. "I turn to the stars first and then your stuff," he says.

A couple of weeks ago, three words and almost forgotten, we referred to "Mrs Gerrard's scrappins". Mrs Gerrard ran a fish and chip shop in Shildon, opposite the King Willie; scrappins, as most folk will remember, were the little burned bits - the blacker the better - which on request were shovelled thickly on top.

"I'd have given up the fish for the scrappins," says Harry and - as his charming letter explains - he has good reason to recall their excellence.

Harry had met Rebecca Gerrard's granddaughter June in January, 1956, at the Leasingthorne Shilling Hop. "As June used to work in the fish shop, most of our courting had to be done in the back room, under the stern gaze of grandma. There wasn't much privacy. I can tell you.

"They were heady days, working down Leasingthorne pit, quick wash in the tin bath and then dressed up - crepe shoes, gaberdine suit, fluff up the DA* and leg it to Leeholme to catch the Eden bus to the King Willie.

"Always there was a lovely big cod, or haddock, and a bag of chips with lashings of scraps and always grandma would ask if they were all right.

"She'd stare at you as if daring you to say no, but knowing they were the best in Shildon."

When Leasingthorne colliery closed, Harry and June - married by then - moved to the Gower coal field in south Wales. "Unlike here they were 12ft seams, and stretcher cases at least once a week.

"We'd thought about going to Australia or Canada, and we chose the wrong place."

Back in the North-East, he worked for 20 years at Teesside Airport and now lives in Yarm. Sadly, June died ten years ago.

"I still have so many memories," he writes, "just waiting for someone like your good self to unlock them with words like 'Mrs Gerrard's scrappins'."

*DA? Don't ask.

MR George Galloway, the Labour MP with the Armani suits, the holiday home in the Algarve and the friends in high Iraqi places, is the member for Glasgow Hillhead.

Blanket coverage in Sunday's papers stirred memories of a visit during the 1992 general election campaign to Govan, the neighbouring high tenemented constituency.

Four years earlier, the SNP had overturned a 20,000 Labour majority. "The good news for the Tories is that they beat the Raving Loonies and the Zippy Rainbow Alliance," we wrote.

"The bad news is that they didn't beat them by much."

The 1992 Tory candidate was Alan Donnelly, Jarrow lad and oil rig worker, fighting his 11th municipal and parliamentary election and seeking his first win. "This one," we noted, "is the electoral equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge with a nail varnish brush."

The Independent had offered no more hope. "One of the greatest entertainments of any election is watching the Tories trying to win votes in Glasgow," wrote their diarist.

Alan Donnelly lost, inevitably, though he gained almost ten per cent of the vote and the Glasgow Herald offered some comfort - "he's not really an Englishman at all, he's a Geordie."

Whatever happened to that wonderful windmill tilter?

ANYONE who's been to the US will have seen the big yellow buses, school uniform, which take 54 per cent of America's under 12s to their lessons.

Moir Lockhead, the former West Cornforth secondary modern pupil who went from being an apprentice at the United to chairman of the multi-faceted First Group, is trying to introduce them to Britain.

Although there are pilot schemes in five towns, the wheels turn pretty slowly. Education authorities, par for the curriculum, don't want to fork out.

Should the entrepreneurial Mr Lockhead wish to expand his scheme, however, he could always look, closer to home, at the route from Darlington to Catterick Garrison - and lay on special buses for all the anti-social squaddies.

THINE Be the Glory, we wrote last week, is the accompaniment to which we shall be carried from the church. It's on Tony Buglass's shortlist, too, and he's the superintendent Methodist minister in Pickering.

"The vicar who married us in Cullercoats always said that the English version was just an excuse to sing the tune. He did have a point. The French words are superb - if the congregation can sing in French, that is."

Tony does have misgivings about the tune, however, written by Handel in celebration of Butcher Cumberland's victory at Culloden.

"We both have Scottish blood and have been to Culloden, one of the saddest places on earth. We don't like that man Cumberland and like Bonnie Prince Charlie less, 'cos it was his fault so it did cast a shadow over one of our favourite hymns.

"In the best spirit of a Gospel of redemption, however, we don't let Handel's reasons for writing it get in the way of a really good sing on Easter Sunday."

ENCOUNTERED at a do last Friday, Tyne Tees Television presenter Rob Williams hooks the column's attention with talk of rubber ducks, and similarly aquatic animals.

In 1992, says Rob, a container ship heading across the Pacific towards Canada met heavy weather and lost one of its containers overboard.

It held packets of bathroom toys, each embracing a duck, a frog, a beaver (we're talking an American market here) and a turtle. The packs split open, the toys went their own ways and oceanographers began a voyage of discovery.

About now, they reckon, a lot of rubber ducks may land on the west of coast of Scotland, which explains Rob's recent holiday on the Mull of Kintyre. ("Did I find any? Did I hell.")

This is serious stuff, nonetheless. A scientist called Curtis Ebbsmeyer, said on a Message in a Bottle website to have a vast private army of beachcombers, has made a huge study of such things - current affairs, as it were.

"If two bath toys are dumped in the Pacific, at the same moment in the same spot, one may wash up in Hawaii while the other may end up frozen in an Arctic ice floe."

Flip-flops behave in similarly perverse ways. "It seems that because of their hydrodynamic shape the left flip-flop floats off in one direction while the right flip-flop goes in another, so you'll never find a pair on the beach," says Rob.

Floating junk? The column returns next week.