IT IS to be another catch-up day, Jimi Hendrix perforce relocated to tomorrow's John North column because of pressurised space. The transfer fee, undisclosed, is thought to be substantial.

We'd mentioned two weeks ago Hendrix's appearance in Darlington in the 1960s, but who was instrumental in getting him here? Who amid all the rhythm and booze stole the great man's guitar and, while we're about it, did Elton John really play the Skerne Park Hotel?

With further memories of mods and rockers, more strings attached on Thursday.

THE column on April 11 also revealed that amosite, of all the dusty answers, had been found in the flat garage roofs in Middleton Tyas, near Scotch Corner. It's a form of brown asbestos and, like all Amos compounds, quite harmless if left alone.

From that same affected avenue in Middleton Tyas, however, Steve Leonard sends the official programme (price 1d) from the Yorkshire Boys v Durham Boys football match at Hull City's ground on March 19, 1955.

Though it's not the point, the Durham team rings few familiar bells: Drummond (Chester-le-Street), Eley (Chester-le-Street), Darby (Kelloe); Latham (South Shields), Bell (Bishop Auckland), Oliver (Sunderland); Bleanch (Lambton and Hetton), Richardson (Gateshead), Brannigan (Derwent Valley), Bryon (Bishop Auckland), Waldock (Bishop Auckland).

What catches Steve's intrepid eye is the advert on the back for "The finest sports shop in the British Isles" - a handsome Humber emporium called Asbestos. Can any reader, Hull and back or otherwise, suggests how it came by its name? Or why, for that matter, flammable and inflammable mean exactly the same thing?

STILL shopping, Tim Grimshaw - "your faithful and partly alert North Tyneside correspondent" - noticed a tempting special offer on black pudding at William Wight's butcher's in North Shields.

"Nice and spicy and no lumps of fat - just like the wife," it says.

Mr Wight is clearly a very lucky man.

FROM Wight's black pudding to mondegreens, with which recent columns have been quite liberally planted. A mondegreen, it will be remembered, is a misheard song lyric and Phil Steele in Crook wonders that no one has hitherto mentioned the famous Judy Garland example - you know, "Somewhere over the rainbow, weigh a pie."

Kevin O'Beirne in Sunderland reckons the most misunderstood song of all time was probably Louie, Louie - a big US hit for the Kingsmen in the 1960s - in which the lyrics were so hard to discern "that it was assumed in high places they must be pornographic or otherwise seditious". The Federal Communications Commission duly investigated but was obliged to concede defeat. Louie, Louie, the Commission concluded, was "unintelligible at any speed we played it".

Steve Connor in Darlington insists that the line from Blur's Song 2 "I got my head checked by a jumbo jet" was misconstrued as "I got my head shaved by a spam addict" whilst Brian Madden, also in Darlington, habitually misheard snatch from Super Trouper, by Abba. It wasn't "When I saw you last night in Tesco's" after all. Glasgow, apparently.

Brian also recalls what might be termed a classic mondegreen, in that it was in Latin. When, long ago, he was an altar boy, a fellow server offered the response: "Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy."

Lost in the translation, it should, of course, have been "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" - and punitively, says Brian, it proved. "Fr Lynch thumped him round the lug."

THE real classic, we'd suggested two weeks ago, was the largely nonsensical children's song that appears to begin "Maizy dotes and dozey dotes..."

Visiting Liverpool, Gill Wootten noticed a sign for the "Mersey Docks and Harbour Board" - beneath which someone had lyrically added "and little lambsy divies."

MORE mispronunciation than mishearing, Colin Randall - Shildon lad made Daily Telegraph - reports that a Sky News presenter introduced a foot-and-mouth disease report from "Toe Low", the second bit pronounced as in Lowry. "Even at its lowest point in trying to grapple with Co Durham place names," says Colin, "the BBC never got it as wrong as that."

CUT back to our religious correspondents, and not just Sue Heath from Scotton, near Richmond, who recalls a childhood belief that Christ promised to make his apostles vicious old men. The gospels recount it differently: "Fishers of men" sounds rather more evangelical.

The column had also been pondering the old rhyme - Tid, Mid, Misere, Carlin, Palm, Paste Egg Day - for the Sundays, most of them, approaching Easter. At this rate, we'll be struggling next Easter.

"Tid", suggests Pat Cariss in Killerby, Richmond, is an old word for "third" - but it's not the third Sunday, it's the second. And what of the first?

"Mid" might just be mid-Lent Sunday and "misere" (suggests Pat) might be a corruption of the word "mercy". It's also the first word, in Latin, of the psalm appointed for the fourth Sunday in Lent.

But if Carlin, Palm and Paste Egg Day are as self-explanatory as Ian Andrew in Lanchester insists, then he's not been talking to Peter Elliott in Eaglescliffe.

"I have always been led to believe that it's not Paste Egg Day but Pace Egg Day, from the adjective 'Paschal', meaning Easter," writes Peter.

David Armstrong in Barnard Castle is equally flummoxed: "I have tried for many years to find an explanation for the rhyme which everyone of a certain age in Co Durham remembers from their youth," he writes. "You would do another profound service by teasing out an explanation."

Perhaps even in those post-Lenten feast days, someone may be able to help.

WE'D also written a few sentences about women judges from the North-East, which prompts a (sadly anonymous) reader to add "Judge Brenda Hale, educated at Richmond High School for Girls."

"Judge" Hale is actually the Rt Hon Lady Justice Hale QC, an appeal court judge since 1999 and still with an address in the more northerly (and infinitely more agreeable) of the Richmonds.

In Who's Who Dame Brenda, 56, alliteratively lists her recreations as "domesticity, drama and duplicate bridge". Can anyone, an old school friend perhaps, put more cards on the table?

* And finally, a touch of the Seasonally Affected Disorders in a letter to The Times from the Rev Nick Percival in South Shields. "Before moving to the North-East I was informed that I would encounter wet and windy conditions for three months of the year and that the rest would be the winter."

It brought a response from someone who'd been in St Petersburg. "Here," said the guide, "summer is nine months of anticipation and three months of disappointment" - and so it may very soon prove.