Black clad as a referee always should be - T-shirt, tracksuit, baseball cap - Jeff Winter kicks off slightly late for lunch, shoves his mobile phone into his cap, decides his order in the approximate time it takes to say "Name and number".

"Fettuccine, plenty of carbohydrates," he explains, as if 20 minutes trying to find the restaurant - "power walking" - weren't enough health consciousness for one August afternoon.

The elite new breed of "professional" referee - professional, not full time - has had nutritional advice, of course. They've had motivation, man management and media training, too, though he knows - since we are old friends and he is a very good bloke - that there are some things for which not even Max Clifford himself could prepare.

The telephone rings from inside his cap. It's Peter Mulcaster, manager of Northallerton Town, who's lying on a beach in Ibiza but ringing to report that it's raining so hard - in Northallerton presumably, not Ibiza - that the evening's friendly against Whitley Bay has been postponed.

Jeff's due to referee it, his 16th match of the pre-season build up, mostly for old friends from Northern League days. At Whitby Town - "lovely, lovely people" - his fee is usually a pair of kippers.

Match off, he's ordered chips with his fettucine, followed with hot chocolate fudge cake - "ice cream not cream, mind" - when his baseball cap rings again.

It's Peter Mulcaster, still on his back in Ibitha. It's stopped raining - in Northallerton - and the match is on again. "Great," says Jeff, "it saves me having to go the gym tonight."

(Why Northallerton Town's means of communication are what might best be termed circuitous is not something which need worry us here.)

Apart from the leading players and managers, Jeff Winter - Premiership referee, self-employed financial services adviser, Middlesbrough magistrate and entertaining after dinner speaker - is probably the best known face in North-East football.

He's 46, hopes to have at least three more seasons at the top, faces the new challenge of "professionalism" - £33,000 annual retainer, £500 match fee - like a man who's been on a media training course.

"We will now have professional training and more time to sit down together to look at videos, to discuss things and to learn from our own mistakes and from other people's.

"There will be more chance of consistency, greater understanding and greater fitness. You won't be at the mercy of the boss, perhaps driving home from London after a night match and being at work first thing the following morning. I feel almost like a professional footballer."

He was born in Middlesbrough town centre - "I always say that if a true Cockney was born within the sound of Bow bells, then a true Middlesbrough lad was born within sight of the town hall clock" - worked in a bank where the North Riding FA secretary, a customer, persuaded him to become a referee. It was 1979 and he'd only do Sundays unless Middlesbrough hadn't a match.

Since then he has whistled his way through Winter's Tales and Winters of Discontent, spent eight years as a Northern League referee - "all I know about being a class one official off the field I learned from Gordon Nicholson, the Northern League secretary" - become one of the most admired, enthusiastic and approachable officials in the game and acquired a collection of referee shirts as multi-coloured as Joseph's fanciful top coat.

"I prefer black, that's why I like the FA Cup so much," he says. "It's the only time I look like a referee."

Since his baseball cap rings on several other occasions during lunch, it might also be recorded that he has mastered the singular accomplishment of speaking into a mobile telephone, working an electronic diary and eating fettuccine and chips simultaneously.

"Have you noticed," he says, "that not one person has rung me about my business?"

His refereeing career began on the Harold Wilson Recreation Ground in Thornaby - "Yarm FC against someone I've forgotten" - each of his 1,850 games recorded, in detail, thereafter. One day, he supposes, there might be a volume of memoirs in it.

He's been a Premiership referee for six years, approaches the new season like an open book, accepts the pressure and the recognition in the street but knows that he'll need an understanding wife ("I have one") to get through it.

Under the new regime, referees will only be told their appointments on the Monday evening before the relevant weekend - "not much good planning a social life" - spend three days fortnightly at a conference centre in Northamptonshire before going straight to their games, have quarterly meetings with assistant referees and two monthly assessments (the so-called "fatness tests") on blood lactate and body fat levels. Those failing may temporarily be stood down.

"It will be strange at first. After all these years being adults it's like in some ways going back to the dormitory scenario," says Jeff, who admits to having to work harder than most to maintain peak fitness.

"I'm not a natural athlete. There's hardly a day when I don't train and I've hardly had a drink all summer."

The four member team of match officials will stay together in a hotel the night before the game, be taken to the ground in a people carrier, have a post-match debriefing with the observer - now called the match delegate - and return to the hotel generally without fraternising with players and management.

"For forward transmission whence we came" says Jeff - he probably learned that one on media training, too - and semi-isolation is probably the bit he might find most difficult.

"No matter what happened in the Northern League it was forgotten after an hour in the clubhouse afterwards, but you have to remember that the Premiership is very big business indeed. We have to respect players and management but not be seen to do anything to affect our impartiality. It's probably not wise to eat from the same trough, so to speak."

Having supped with the devil, if not quite from the same trough, he walks for half a mile back along Corporation Road in Middlesbrough, for once unrecognised beneath the baseball cap.

"If that's the only downside then there's really not a lot to complain about," he says, "but it's still an awfully long way from the Harold Wilson rec."

As the column last week had supposed likely, we headed on Tuesday for the first football match of the pre-season - Stanley United v Crook Town, Ernest Armstrong Memorial Cup.

Ernest - former NW Durham MP, Commons deputy Speaker and nationally prominent Methodist - both played for Stanley and preached at Wooley Terrace chapel, windblown out the back. If his sermons were hellfire, his tackles - they reckoned - were brimstone.

Stanley Hill Top has a fearful reputation of its own, of course, and on Tuesday evening it dismally lived down to it.

You couldn't see the Little House on the Prairie from 20 yards distant and even if the mist hadn't been down, it was raining so hard that the pitch was probably under six inches of water.

Five minutes before the start the referee called it off, an ominous start to the season and a hell of a long way back on the nomadic number one bus.

At least it didn't thunder. That skyward rumbling would only be Ernie Armstrong, bless him, enjoying a quiet chuckle.

Jeff Winter, just a bit bairn then, also co-wrote a piece in the Northern League's 1989 centenary history on the league's rich seam of referees.

It included an anecdote from Spennymoor ref Fred Lightfoot - now 76 and still blowing strong - about an FA Cup tie between Cockfield and Stanley in which he found himself a linesman short.

Up stepped a well built Stanley supporter who, said Fred, had given him a "right tanking" whenever he made it to the Hill Top. The emergency referee performed impeccably. It was, of course, the Rt Hon Ernest Armstrong.

Whilst the heavens opened on Stanley United, the clouds lifted a little over Ferryhill Athletic, another of the region's oldest and best known clubs.

An extraordinary general meeting on Tuesday evening attracted nine new committee members, including three players and the editor of the Ferryhill Chapter.

"I gave them a proper sob story about allegiance to the community and that sort of thing. They took it very well," says club chairman Norman Bellwood.

Ferryhill kick off their Wearside League season at home to Jarrow tomorrow, and entertain Ryhope on Wednesday. "At least we've survived," says Norman. "Now we have to build on it."

Dammit, but here's the season's first newsletter from the Northern League Club - magnificent value, ring here for details - and word of yet more trouble for our old Scouse friend Graeme Holmes.

Graeme's sporting forays to the North-East appear inevitably to be jinxed. On the latest, he planned to visit former Northern League grounds - Darlington Cleveland Bridge, Ferryhill, Langley Park, South Bank and so forth.

It may not be said that all had gone well - it's not an ideal Holmes exhibition we're on about - but they got worse still when he tried to find Stanley United.

No one he asked had any idea where the ground was, and Backtrack readers won't need telling why. Like thousands before him, he was 20 miles too far north. He'd gone to the wrong Stanley.

The piece (July 31) on 51-year-old Alan Foggon's return to football with Hebburn Duggie's Tavern in the Over 40s League reminded Leslie Boyd in Darlington - via a beautifully scripted note - of his favourite back page headline. The great man had scored a crucial last minute winner. The sub-editor - "Foggon conclusion" - said it all.

....and finally,

the Olympic team sport in which only one medal is awarded (Backtrack, August 3) is, of course, show jumping.

Readers may today care to identify the world heavyweight boxing champion who held the title for 11 years and 25 days.

We punch our weight again on Tuesday.