EVERYONE knows that the John Bull in Alnwick is a great pub. Top it all, it’s just been named the Tyneside and Northumberland CAMRA pub of the year. That’s not the serendipitous bit.

We land there at 6.15pm last Tuesday, expecting to enjoy a quiet pint before the match and stumble instead across a whole old ball game.

Alnwick’s annual Shrove Tuesday mud bath may be akin to that played in Sedgefield, County Durham, and about as uncivilised. Kicked off in 1762, said first to have used a Scotsman’s head in lieu of a ball – then as now, no borderline Anglophobia up there – it’s played with goals about 400 yards apart and, inexplicably, covered in foliage.

Last Tuesday’s is the annual windup meeting, a wonderfully jolly occasion about which Peter Tinniswood (or, perhaps, Alan Ayckbourn) might have written a play.

As tradition demands, the meeting hears, the day had started with pancakes.

By 2pm, players and spectators gather at the castle gate, from which the Duke of Northumberland – master of pretty much all that he surveys – throws the ball over the wall and into the scrum.

Led by the Duke’s piper – a Northumberland piper, of course – the ball is then marched to The Pastures where battle commences.

There’s a chap carrying the Union flag, too. “Blow Scotland,” says the annual report, or words to that effect, and the John Bull applauds patriotically.

The goals are known as hales, the match traditionally between St Michael’s and St Paul’s. St Paul’s had won 2-1. “It’s not really a grown up game,” someone says. “There can’t have been above five adults.”

There’s controversy, though, and it’s all about “goal mooching”. Some want it outlawed. That’s the serendipitous bit.

WHEN not defining serendipity – long the column’s favourite word – Chambers classifies “mooch” as “To play truant, to go blackberrying, to slope off, to loiter, to skulk”.

Goal mooching, apparently, is the trick of hanging idly around one goal mouth while all the action is at the other end, hoping for a lucky break.

Something similar used to happen when we played football in the backstreets of Shildon, the offside law not generally having permeated those parts.

Some, of course, would suggest that one or two leading Premier League players have mooching down to an art form.

There was even a letter about it, once, in the football magazine, When Saturday Comes.

At Alnwick it’s frowned upon.

They don’t think mooch of mooching.

EVEN in the public bar of the John Bull, the word at once calls to mind Wimpy the Moocher, that being the soubriquet by which J Wellington Wimpy was usually known (and not, so far as may be ascertained, because he was in the habit of wandering off to pick blackberries.) Wimpy was not only a character in the comic and cartoon series Popeye – “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” – but gave his name to the worldwide Wimpy Bar chain, opened in Britain in 1954 and once on every High Street. Big Mac, and others, then ate greatly into its profitability.

Popeye the Sailor was a strong man, said when first he appeared in 1929 to get his strength by rubbing himself with a magic hen and, later, via the endless cans of spinach which seemed forever to be secreted about his person.

J Wellington Wimpy joined a cast of characters like Olive Oyl, the baby Sweet Pea – a “ward” whom Popeye was said to have received through the post – Eugene the Jeep, Sea Hag, assorted Goons and the brutal, blustering Bluto. Such Popeye’s invincibility that several statues exist in what apparently is called America’s spinach belt.

For Quaker Oats commercials, however, his song “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” was replaced by “I’m Popeye the Quaker man. Since it was usually chorused after he’d knocked nine bells out of Bluto, the peaceable Religious Society of Friends – more familiarly the Quakers – not unreasonably objected.

Nor, since they were early champions of equality, were the Quakers best pleased by the portrayal of the submissive Ms Oyl The fat little guy in the pork pie hat just mooched on. For J Wellington Wimpy, Tuesday never came.

THERE was a Wimpy Bar in Bishop Auckland, in irresistible proximity to the proggy matted little place above the money lender’s which served as a branch office for the Echo and the Northern Despatch.

The money lender invariably being unforthcoming, we’d have to wait until Friday – pay day – before cashing the cheque at the Midland Bank and falling for Wimpy’s warm embrace. The king-size, the one with American sausage and pickle and things, was 4/9d. The pay cheque was £9 1s 6d.

Another branch was in Darlington, near the Odeon in Bondgate. You’d stoke up there, chips on a good day, before a couple of hours of back row bravado.

The chain inspired by Wimpy the Moocher now seems much diminished, only 93 franchises listed on the website. They range from Aberdeen (Sunset Boulevard, no less) to Brighton, but none nearer North-East England than Huddersfield.

Old time’s sake, it was tempting to go – a temptation finally resisted. No matter where you may mooch, serendipity can’t be sustained for ever.