Breakfast yesterday with the Rev Mary Vickers - priest, all-round sportswoman and as good a testament to Christian humility as it may be possible to meet over a plate of toasted teacake.

Asked her finest sporting moment, she guesses that it was in her second London Marathon, when she sliced 40 minutes from her time in the first.

"Mind," adds Mary, "it just shows how awful I was in the first."

Invited to name her best achievement as a coach, she supposes it may have been helping a woman who couldn't run a mile without stopping to complete a half marathon six months later.

"What's more," says Mary, "she beat me."

Since January she has been unpaid curate of the parishes of Hipswell and Colburn, near Catterick Garrison - where her husband Peter is an army chaplain. Both were part of the sports chaplaincy team at the Athens Olympics, both are national track event judges.

Now Mary has been appointed national co-ordinator for women in sport by SCORE, the sports chaplaincy charity.

For the moment, at least, the wages are precisely the same as those for her parish ministry.

Always interested in sport, never (she says) much good at it - "I got as far as the hockey second team at school; I was once chosen for the first team but they cancelled the game" - she discovered a new competitive edge when living in Germany, where her husband had been posted. A few weeks later, he was sent to Northern Ireland without her.

"I joined a running club with the express aim of making some friends and then leaving. I made some friends and stayed; 20 months later I was running marathons."

Her running presently restricted by athlete's knee - "I bent down to get something in Tesco's and couldn't get up again" - she now regularly swims a non-stop mile, has bought a "good" bike and is hard riding the Yorkshire dales, despite an accident just before Christmas last year.

"I just skidded and came off; I remember lying there thinking 'Ooohhh.' I'm not a saint, but I think I was too stunned for an expletive even to occur to me.

"I managed to do a Christmas Eve midnight communion service but someone told me I looked terrible."

The likelihood is that she will concentrate on what rather euphemistically is called the mini-triathlon - "1500m swim, 15-16 miles on the bike, three to four mile run."

Her new work among sportswomen will be national, inter-denominational and (of course) among those of no particular faith at all. It will also cover all sports; were it confined to athletics, she might best be described as a running mate.

"I've done quite a lot of listening and sharing with women runners but Score is there for everyone. We want to be alongside people," she says.

"In my parish ministry I've always been happier outside the church. I enjoy being inside it, too, but I like getting out into the local community, spending time with organisations, sports clubs and pubs, getting them to think about the Church."

SCORE describes its chaplains - now in place at almost every Premiership and Football League club and in the Arngrove Northern League - as "more than a social worker but not an evangelist, offering care and support professionally but with a spiritual dimension."

The organisation is ready further to help all sports players, men and women, in the North-East and would also welcome offers of support. Details on www.scorechaplaincy.org.uk; the Rev Mary Vickers is at mjvscoreuk@tiscali.co.uk

GrahamE Robertson married the lovely Theresa Blanchard on Saturday. Appropriately for a former Durham County player, the do was at Bishop Auckland Rugby Club, the column dancing attendance.

The rugby club is also the venue for cricket, for a sub-aqua club - deep end conditions on Saturday - and to the Durham Tigers Rugby League club who, like the Water Rat, aren't deterred by a little wet.

League's a summer game now, the Tigers drawn mainly from Bishop Auckland and Consett rugby union clubs and undertaking enthusiastic missionary work in the winter.

Already they have input into 14 primary and four secondary schools in the Durham area. In September they begin coaching at schools in Bishop Auckland and Weardale and hope to have teams - cubs, no doubt - at Under 11, 14 and 15 levels.

On Saturday the Tigers trailed with ten minutes left but beat Newcastle Knights 28-16 in the Totalrl.com Conference play-offs and meet Wetherby in the northern final.

Pete Gallone, the skipper, is also much gilded on the RU club's captains' board and was thus neatly able to sidestep the question about which code he preferred.

"They're both rugby," he said, "therefore they're both magnificent."

"Dancing attendance" may not strictly have been true, because when the music started a group of wilting wallflowers hoofed up Newton Cap bank to the pub.

Until a decade or so ago, the bank formed the main road westwards out of the town, cheek by jowl terraced housing rising vertiginously on either side.

One of the party thus recalled the still infamous 1950s incident when the triumphant Crook Town football team, returning in an open-topped bus from the Amateur Cup final at Wembley, was soaked by the contents of receptacles (shall we say) propelled from the upper storeys.

We spent another part of the weekend reading Glory Years, Alan Adamthwaite's carefully researched account of the Bishops' own Wembley days, to be launched at the players' reunion on August 12. Curiously, the Newton Cap caper doesn't seem to be mentioned at all.

Among the other talking points at Saturday's wedding was a Radio 4 programme that morning on Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track - the athlete who trained on fish and chips and who gave to the English language the phrase "Bloomin' Ada."

Brendan Foster talked of how Tupper had been his inspiration when the character switched from the Rover comic to the Victor - "I saw myself as another bloke from the north overcoming his struggles" - while a more surprising contribution came from North-East born heavy metal guitarist Tony Liddle.

Liddle had done his homework, noted references in the Tupper canon to Dunham and to Northcastle, reckoned that Alf came from Stanley.

That afternoon, probably coincidentally, a Mark Tompkins two-year-old by the name of Alf Tupper made its racing debut at Goodwood.

Perhaps because it hadn't trained on fish and chips, perhaps because it didn't listen to Radio 4, the poor horse finished tenth out of 12.

Blow me, if there's not an e-mail from King James Cricket Club, who play a rather different ball game at Bishop Auckland RFC. To mark their 25th anniversary, says John Raw, an "assorted" XI and an old boys XI meet this Sunday (2 15pm) and would welcome familiar faces - especially from the two teams which ("one more curtain call" ) won promotion in 1993. This year they lead the Darlington and District League division C. It'll be a grand occasion, says John - just like Grahame and Theresa's wedding, then.

...and finally

The club for which 1950s Amateur Cup hero and celebrated Co Durham musician John Taylor made his two Football League appearances (Backtrack, July 29) was Crystal Palace.

Brian Dixon in Darlington, who knew the answer to that one, today invites readers to name Chelsea's opponents when last they reached the FA Charity Shield - the Community Shield this weekend - as Football League champions.

Remembering where Charity begins, there may be rather more memories of that competition when the column returns on Friday.

Published: 02/08/2005