Wine-up merchants

Thackley play Thornaby, FA Vase first qualifying round. 9.49 from Darlington and, inevitably, a happy hen party on board. Approaching Northallerton, their music machine plays Stop in the Name of Love. Unromantically, the TransPennine Express speeds past.

We change at Leeds for the branch line to Apperley Bridge, that being the nearest station since Thackley’s closed to passengers in 1931, locals dependent thereafter on the trolley bus to Shipley. The only slight problem this time is that some of the gentlemen of the RMT union are again on strike (which should not be confused, see below, with being idle.)

The half-hourly service becomes hourly, West Yorkshire’s suburban sets still about 30 years newer and five times more comfortable than those in North-East England.

The particular consolation is that Leeds station, which frequently resembles the seventh circle of hell, seems altogether quieter and more congenial.

Five of us are now entrained. “True or false, Scotland has more than 450 golf courses,” demands Mr Nigel Brierley.

Old Foggy Dewhirst would have known that in a trice. Apparently it’s true.

Thackley’s near the Leeds-Liverpool canal, formerly a cotton milling village and just half a mile from Idle. There’s a danger that the Idle metaphor may be overworked.

It’s best known, of course, for its workmen’s club, formed in 1928 by a group of sewage workers fed up that their shifts – and perhaps their calling – were anti-social. They wanted better opening hours.

The club emblem’s a bloke leaning indolently on a spade, honorary members range from Mohammad al Fayed to Lester Piggott and from Gazza to Geller. None of them appears to be female.

Idle was also the birthplace of Joseph Wilson, who started work at six as a donkey boy in a nearby quarry, couldn’t read until he was 15, became professor of linguistics at Oxford, taught J R R Tolkien, wrote the English Dialect Dictionary in six volumes and in 1897 formed the Yorkshire Dialect Society which flourishes yet.

In Idle the dialect’s economical, the definite article – the word “the” – now almost completely redundant.

Professor Wilson was also renowned for teaching his Aberdeen terrier to lick its lips when he mentioned the Gothic term for fig tree and for his final word when shuffling from the earthly realm. It was “dictionary.”

The Idle Workmen’s Club not properly being open until 7pm – lazy beggars – we essay the three-mile climb from Apperley Bridge to Thackley via a pint in the Dog and Gun and another in the Commercial.

Two things of which Compo and Co would hardly have approved suggest themselves en route, the first that we appear to have become a nation of canine beauty parlours, from Pretty Paws to Waggy Tails.

It’s a modern curiosity that, while so many pooches are immaculately groomed, their owners appear dog rough.

The other egregiousness, and by no means confined to the West Riding of Yorkshire, is that pubs which until recently offered only mild or bitter – or on a good day half-and-half – seem to be turning into post-industrial gin palaces.

In the Commercial, an otherwise pleasant place where a sign advises that you can tell a Yorkshireman but can’t tell him much, the so-called drinks menu offers everything from marmalade vodka to rhubarb gin – “voluptuous on the palate,” it adds.

In the manner of what once was supposed a chaser, Mr Gary Brand orders something called a Black Cow Pure Milk Vodka, said on the menu to be the only vodka on the market made entirely from the milk of grass-grazed cows.

Mr Brand, who is both a Londoner and a Spurs supporter and must be excused on both counts, insists that he can taste the milk.

It has come to this, that you pay the neck end of £4 for half-a-teaspoonful of milk.

Thackley play in the top division of the Northern Counties East League, that of Penistone Church, Handsworth Parramore and Hemsworth Miners Welfare. Thornaby are in the second division of the Ebac Northern League.

The programme recalls that the sides have met just once previously, at Thornaby in 2008, a match memorable not just for the 4-5 score but for the fact that someone pinched the gate money.

Since the crowd was just 38, the wretched culprit may not have retired to the Costa del Crime on the proceeds.

The ground’s splendidly set on the edge of Buck Wood, Thornaby’s home also recently and verdantly transformed on the edge of urban Teesside. They could have filmed Summer Wine at either of them.

Thornaby’s chairman, new and greatly enthusiastic, is Apollinaire Quedraogo, perhaps the only Burkina Faso under-17 international goalkeeper to play in the Northern League for Norton and Stockton Ancients.

The man they call Apollo came from the land-locked and impoverished West African country in the year 2000, thought he might have played professionally had his work permit come through more quickly, managed just one match. The Ancients lost 5-4 to South Shields.

Apollo’s immaculately turned out. Committee colleagues, more familiarly seen as nature intended – who ever saw a chaffinch wearing a tie? – try to follow his example but look a bit hot and bothered.

He’s now 39, runs a restaurant in Middlesbrough, has big plans for Thornaby. “Lovely people,” says Apollo, inarguably.

Back in 2005 he’d managed a Middlesbrough Sunday Afternoon League team called the International Centre, usually known as the Asylum Seekers. Though they resigned at the end of the season, Apollo still turned up at the annual league meeting bearing the £14 he’d forgotten to pay the referee at their last game.

Burkina Faso translates as “The Land of the Incorruptible Men.”

“We like to live up to it,” he said.

The Thackley programme not only has mention of Ivar the Boneless and Sigard-Snake-in-the-Eye but also notes that at least one Northern League side has reached the Vase final in each of the last ten seasons, the Railroad to Wembley a pretty efficient operator.

At half-time it’s 1-1, soon afterwards 3-1 to the hosts. Though Thornaby pull a goal back in added time, they fall at the first hurdle. Other Ebac Northern League teams do much better, many lines on the railroad still open.

Seeking to avoid an RMT-junction, we head back to Leeds on this occasion on the No 60 – the over-60 – bus. Like Cleggy, some still clutch plastic macs, like Compo most fancy a pint. We head for The Grove, the credits rolling quietly on another ageless episode.