If anything likely to fill the column happened during last week's holiday in Dorset - three legged footballers, spuggies killed at square leg, that sort of thing - it sure as apples never made the Bridport Echo.

We can only report that Jamie Coppinger has gone from Newcastle United to Exeter City on a free, having been sold by Darlington to Newcastle for £250,000 two years ago.

Memory suggests that the Quakers were on a sell-on percentage: George's accountants will doubtless confirm that a percentage of nowt remains nowt.

Others may know if the fair Coppinger is the first player to go directly from St James's Park to St James's Park.

Another of the west country newspapers reported that Arthur Milton, the last man to play both football and cricket for England, has got himself a new job.

Milton had made just 12 Football League appearances - for Arsenal in 1951-52 - when named as England's outside right. It remained his only cap; the following season he was transferred to third division Bristol City, played 14 games and packed up..

First appearances proved similarly deceptive at cricket: after an undefeated century in his first test, he played six more England games and never managed more than 17.

He became a postman and, fond of the stars and the solitude, still gets on his bike every morning. Mr Milton is the village paper boy. He is 74.

First night back, and a two hour bus ride to Tow Law for the football club's annual real ale extravaganza and gallantry awards.

The day previously, local polliss and football club committee member Steve Moralee had seen a snow plough heading up the street - a dry run, as things turned out.

"I thought it was a week or two early, even for Tow Law," said PC Moralee.

For a 50 per cent success rate in distinguishing real ale from the other stuff, the column was awarded a thermal vest, reduced from £8.75 to a fiver - summer sale, presumably - at Fenwick's.

It was a very good (and almost balmy) evening, particularly for team manager Dr Graeme Forster - the Lawyers' answer to Metal Mickey - who'd got lucky on Frankie Dettori's 4-1 shot in the last race at Sandown.

Village bookie and football committee man Kevin McCormick smiled ruefully; Doc Forster counted his roll. Impossibly appropriate, the winner was called Football crazy.

Sam Gordon, Wembley's first ever mascot when he led out Tow Law in the FA Carlsberg Vase final four years ago, was absent from Saturday's proceedings.

For one thing he's still just a bit bairn, for another he'd turned down goalkeeping trials at Chelsea last weekend to go to Man United instead.

So what odds on the lucky mascot, still just 15, making his Tow Law debut before his 17th birthday? Honest Kevin McCormick reckons even money at best.

A leisurely Sunday lunch with David Jackson, charged - "volunteered" he says - with masterminding the North-East's inaugural football museum.

It's an exciting idea, inspired by Bishop Auckland MP Derek Foster - whose recreations in Who's Who are listed as brass bands, choirs and the Salvation Army but who is believed to be a bit of a Sunderland fan on the quiet. There'll be more meetings in the Commons next week.

West Auckland lad originally, and a former Bishop Auckland cricketer, David has a slight problem, however - he now lives in Lostwitheil, in Cornwall.

His brother Terry, Bishop Auckland FC's new chairman, is much closer to home - he's in Milton Keynes. David had met Derek Foster at the Bishops' final game at Kingsway in April. "I wondered why my brother was so keen for me to come," he says.

The museum will be a non-commercial enterprise. Though they will eventually seek a curator, and an awful lot of memorabilia, David's role is unpaid.

Already, however, he's had meetings with the people at Beamish and the DLI Museum ("they told me the difference between a museum and an exhibition") and has also learned the importance of "icon" - star - exhibits. "It's a long way up the M5," he says.

Given his fetchings up, of course, there could be no better icon than West Auckland's solid silver "World Cup", won in Italy in 1909 and 1911.

The difficulty, of course, is that the original vanished in the night - never legally to be seen again - and the replacement replica is unlikely to be allowed to leave West Auckland without several battalions of Grenadier Guards in close attendance.

"We're thinking of offering an amnesty," he says over the roast pork. "Give is our World Cup back and no questions asked."

The project remains in its infancy: location, funding and style all to be decided. The hope, however, is that the museum will reflect the game's deep mined roots within North-east communities.

The Northern League will play a prominent, perhaps central role. More of the North-East Football Museum, it's to be hoped, before any of us gets much older.

Always good for a paragraph, John Dawson rings on Sunday evening to announce that, three weeks after the domestic football season ended, the new one has begun. The Hartlepool postman and friends got to Gala Fairydean 0 Queen of the South 4 on Saturday. Last season the poor chap managed just 217 matches. "This time," says John, "we're off to a bit better start."

Back at work for 20 minutes yesterday, then off to Durham for a three hour FA appeal hearing into the Northern League's decision to refuse promotion to North Shields.

Malcolm Macdonald, the club's enthusiastic life-president, was among the Shields' contingent.

There aren't winners and losers in these things, but the appeal was dismissed. Shields will again kick off in the Wearside League next month.

From next season, however, automatic promotion and relegation will apply between the Northern League and its feeders.

The Church Times, holiday reading, reprised in Wimbledon fortnight the story of how a North Yorkshire parson twice won the men's singles - with a lovely front page cartoon and a macabre PS.

John Thorneycroft Hartley was Vicar of Burneston, near Bedale, from 1874-1919, so humble about his chances of Wimbledon success in 1879 - the tournament's third year - that he made no provision to cover Sunday services.

After the Saturday semi-final he returned north, sat up all Sunday night with a dying parishioner, rode to Thirsk to catch the first train on Monday morning, changed into his tennis kit in the horse-drawn cab from Kings Cross to Waterloo and arrived just in time to beat Vere St Leger Goold by three sets to nil in the final.

The story was familiar, the PS - provided by the Rev Clive Mansell, Burneston's admirable present incumbent - wasn't.

Though Hartley lived to 86 and is still affectionately remembered in those rural parts, Goold and his wife were stopped by a gendarme in the waiting room at Monaco railway station and ordered to open their case - in which the dismembered body of a Danish widow was found.

Both were convicted of murder, the defeated finalist dying on Devil's Island. What the unfortunate Danish lady was doing in the suitcase, neither history nor the Church Times, alas, reveals.

... and finally

The last former Northern League club to gain promotion to the Football League (Backtrack, June 28) was Scarborough.

Even in deepest Dorsetshire, last week's papers also claimed that Malcolm Percival may be cricket's last streaker after being caught with his trousers off at Lord's and charged with the new offence of aggravated trespass.

Readers are therefore invited to suggest why another Percival has an apparently indelible entry in cricket's record books - and, of course, his home town.

We return, breath back, on Friday.

Published: 09/07/2002