EVEN by this column's circuitous standards, it is hard to know how we came by penguins - "flightless birds of peculiar structure", says Chambers Dictionary. It is there, nonetheless, that we take off.

There'd been penguins in Darlington's South Park, we'd recalled, and a one armed park keeper on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle who looked after them very well.

"His name was Arthur Mothersdale, he had a very loud voice and a big stick," writes Joe Nicholson. "You were always on your best behaviour if Arthur was at work."

Joe, a past president of Cummins Green Bowling Club, met Arthur again when he was green attendant at Hundens Park. "There was no vandalism or damage to bowling greens with characters like Arthur doing their job. They are sadly missed."

MISSED though barely remembered, we'd also wondered about an early children's television programme called Meet The Penguins. Colin Jones in Spennymoor doesn't just recall it, he's found a wonderful website.

Mother and Father Penguin had three children - a boy called Beesie, a girl called Boffles and a baby called Bobo. They lived in an igloo with Aunt Penelope.

The website also includes memories of 1950s favourites like Whirligig, Daisy May (and Saveen), Mr Pastry, All Your Own, Bengo - the puppy drawn by the Austrian with the squeaky pen - and Small Time, co-presented by Muriel Young who retired to an apartment in Stanhope Castle and died only last month.

Remember Pussy Cat Willumn, Ollie Beak, Fred Barker (who looked like a rather puzzled Dougal) and Theodore the Rabbit?

For those of us children of the 12 inch square eyes, however, the most affectionately remembered may be The Bumblies - little, remotely controlled creatures presented by the youthful Michael Bentine.

Bumbly One was (inevitably) the leader, Bumbly Two the fat and jolly one and poor Bumbly Number Three the idiot. Emissaries from the planet Bumble, they had a conveniently magical Bumblescope and slept on the ceiling.

There were only 13 episodes, each 11 minutes long, but they really don't make them like that any more, do they?

*whirligig-tv.co.uk/

WORRYING over the aberrant apostrophe is probably another sign of advancing years. It has become the column's trademark, for all that, and the troublesome little perishers were all over last week's Telegraph, too.

Mr John Richards, a retired sub-editor, has formed the Apostrophe Protection Society and taken to pointing out the error of their grammatical ways to fellow citizens of Boston, Lincolnshire. (A sub-editor, it should perhaps be explained, is a journalist who prepares writers' text before it hits the street. They are as invaluable as they are omniscient.)

The Telegraph had some difficulty with it all, not only pointing out that the Society had just two members - Mr Richards and his son - but reporting the doubts of the Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication at oxford University.

Bostonians were also sceptical. "Sounds to me like he needs a bleeding job," observed a butcher with "Carvery's" painted all over his van.

Perhaps the sedulous sub-editor should also get himself up to the Old Temperance Tearoom at Reeth, in Swaledale, where - reports Clarice Middleton from Richmond - there are apostrophes with almost everything.

Snack's, cake's, sausage's, pea's - almost everything, in fact, except chips.

The coffee, adds Clarice, was excellent.

GORDON Bacon, a former Newton Aycliffe police inspector now on international relief duties in Bosnia, is clearly a bit of a lad for solecisms - howlers - too.

His latest round-robin e-mail includes extracts from some of last year's GCSE papers taken by British 16-year-olds:

Q Name the four seasons.

A Salt, vinegar, pepper and mustard.

Q Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.

A Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like sand, grit, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q Explain how you would go about buying a house.

A To buy a house you have to be well endowed...

IN matters of education, we recalled a couple of weeks back how times were hard, and punishments severe and frequent, at the Catholic school in Tudhoe, near Spennymoor, in 1796.

A book bought second hand at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, at the weekend falls open remarkably at an account of Victorian life at Polam School in Darlington. It was a girls' school, under-funded and under-nourished. M V Hughes, in her first teaching post after leaving Cambridge, recalled it in "A London Girl of the 1880s".

Lunch was "inadequate", supper worse. "A large dish piled high with baked potatoes in their jackets was placed in front of the head, who proceeded to serve them out.

"I looked upon this as an original hors d'oeuvre, but nothing followed. It came on every night but nothing else at all. Our other meals were taken with the boarders and of them I think Squeers himself would have been ashamed. It is no wonder on such a diet the girls were almost impossible to manage."

Polam Hall remains a school for young ladies. In every other respect it has changed entirely for the better.

WE'D also sought classroom memories of Brenda Hale, a former Richmond High School pupil who, at 56, is now a Lord Justice of Appeal. Brenda Richardson from Eppleby, near Richmond, duly obliges.

"Both Brenda and her sister Frances were rather serious and very studious, every teacher's dream.

"The only other thing I recall is their acting ability. Most of us found Shakespeare a bore and a struggle; the Hale sisters excelled. They put us all to shame."

TOERAGS to the bullish, readers continue to differ over the origins of that now familiar term of contempt.

Last week's notion that it owes anything to the Tuarags, a nomadic tribe of the western Sahara, may be discounted, however.

"A load of rubbish," says Michael Hunt - "star of stage, screen and Jobcentre" - from Pittington, near Durham.

Graeme Milburn from Sunderland advances the notion that a "tow" was a flaxen cloth used for cleaning muskets, supporting the "engineer's rag" of earlier columns.

Both Collins Dictionary (per Pete Winstanley in Chester-le-Street) and the Oxford Compact (sent anonymously) disagree, however. Both claim that a toerag was originally a beggar or tramp, from the cloth or bandages which, in place of shoes, they wrapped around their feet.

One sounds as improbable as the next, but that's enough of the old contemptibles for now.

...and finally, Col Jones returns with the requested definition, again from the Internet, of "nyaff" - as in wee nyaff, as in Oor Wullie.

"A nyaff is a useless person, particularly a small one."

Much too big to qualify, this bird of peculiar structure returns, flightless, next week.