SORRY. There hasn't been time to research a proper column this week. Tucking into my Christmas leftovers, I momentarily wondered about bubble and squeak, but I kept getting distracted by all the fascinating nonsense tucked away in the pages of my presents A GIRL called Barb Dwyer was baptised in Thornley, County Durham, on January 7, 1877.

A Scotsman called Hugh Dunnet was not a mystery murder writer but an "attendant to the insane" who is listed in the 1861 census as working at Dinsdale Asylum, near Darlington.

HARRY S Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, didn't have a middle name. The S stands for nothing. His parents couldn't choose which of his grandfathers to name him after, Anderson Shippe Truman or Solomon Young, so they indecisively lobbed an S in there.

MARGARINE Fryer was a ten-year-old girl recorded on the 1841 census in Darlington.

Maud Stale Bun was a 20-year-old on the 1871 census in Sunderland. Flora Sexburga Chambers was born in Durham City in 1874.

Anaesthesia Leech died in Hartlepool in 1903.

IN a chapter entitled "Nestboxes for pleasure", I learn that the pioneer of the modern birdbox was a German called Baron von Berlepsch in the late 19th Century. "He brought a cold and logical eye to the requirements (of the bird) and pursued them with restless efficiency," says the book, apparently in all seriousness.

THERE was a pub in South Shields called The Balancing Eel. To prove he wasn't so drunk he had lost his coordination, a local agreed to balance an eel on his nose.

HAVING just endured a knee operation, I am delighted to learn that I have been delumbated by my surgeon, an underused word which comes from the Latin "to make lame".

DOMINGO Dumdum was baptised at Kirk Merrington on September 4, 1706. Mad Price was born in Bishop Auckland in 1851. Wong Kee was aboard a boat in Middlesbrough when the 1901 census was taken.

IN 1493, Christopher Columbus saw 90 islands in the Caribbean and named them after St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Ursula was the daughter of an English king who, rather than marry a pagan, took 11,000 virgins to Rome to see the Pope. On the way home, they were murdered by Attila the Hun. St Ursula was struck off the list of saints in 1969 because she probably didn't exist, and as for the 11,000 English virgins, they definitely never existed. It seems Ursula's only travelling companion was called Undecimilla, which is Latin for 11,000.

Still in the Caribbean are the Virgin Islands.

THE tapered flag that flies from a lance is a pennouncel.

SOME names haven't stood the test of time.

Fanny, for example, was the most popular girls' name in the 1870s. Then it became a naughty slang word. Therefore, we shouldn't laugh at Fanny Shaver who was married in Stockton in 1842. Or at Dick Hardon who was buried at Auckland in 1571.

THE 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says: "Bubble and Squeak, beef and cabbage fried together. It is so called from its bubbling up and squeaking whilst over the fire."

Another suggestion is that because most vegetables are boiled, the phrase comes from "the bubble of the stew and the squeak of the pig". Christmas provides answers to everything you never knew you didn't know.