PRESUMABLY involving some poor, impoverished sod sitting by a computer in the back bedroom, there are now text messaging services which offer to answer Damn Fool Questions 24 hours a day.

It's a bit like premium rate chat-lines, only cheaper and without the heavy breathing.

Thus at 25 to midnight last Saturday, when one end of the restaurant at Oswald's in Sowerby, Thirsk - an admirable establishment in every way - fell silent as a classic DFQ was punched into the qwerty minded keyboard.

The convivial company had been debating it for 20 minutes: how did Garibaldi biscuits - defined in the Oxford as a "sandwich biscuit with a currant paste filling" - come by their name?

HAD they wanted to know about Bath Olivers, invented by a physician of that splendid Somerset city, we could have saved them fifty pence.

Had they sought the diameter of a Wagon Wheel, the company which made biscuits like biscuits ought to be or the price in 1963 of a dozen Gray Dunn caramel wafers -

Caramel wafers, simply heaven

Twelve for only 1/7d -

it simply wouldn't have been a problem.

Had they wanted an explanation for those sugary confections called "Nice" biscuits - posh folk knew them as "Niece", as in south of France; Shildon lads called them "Nice", as in quite canny - it might have been more problematical.

The DFQ line replied within three minutes, the hubbub ceasing quite suddenly, as becalmed as the Sea of Galilee. Garibaldi biscuits, sometimes known as squashed flies, were so called after Giuseppi Garibaldi's visit to these shores in 1861, it decreed.

As a biscuit man might say, crackers...

GIUSEPPI Garibaldi, otherwise Joseph, was a seafaring general who played a major role in the unification of Italy in 1861 and was much feted thereafter.

His army wore scarlet tunics, hence the originally bright red Garibaldi blouse - and perhaps the Garibaldi fish, of similar hue.

Another website suggests that Garibaldi instructed his cook to come up with a lightweight, high energy food which his troops could eat while on the move, hence the Garibaldi biscuit.

Fewer may know that Forest Football Club, founded in 1865, adopted their bright red colours - and the scarlet-tassled caps which they wore at all times - following Garibaldi's visit.

"They wanted in some way," says one of the websites, "to associate themselves with the daring, tactical ingenuity and swiftness of Garibaldi."

Nottingham Forest, by every account gutless, slow and tactically inept, have just been relegated to the old third division. Not just poor Brian Clough will be turning in his grave.

THEN there's Tarquin Biscuit-Barrel, well rounded member of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who in gaining 223 votes at an earlier general election - more, alas, than the fat chance Ms Boney Maroney in Sedgefield - polled more than the Conservative-Liberal Alliance, the Democratic Monarchist, the Middlesex Suspended Student party and the Humanitarian put together.

Mr Biscuit-Barrel, who now styles himself "squadron leader", originally changed his name from John Desmond Lewis to Tarquin Fimtim-Limbim-Whim-bim Lim Bus Stop-F'tang-F'tang-Ole Biscuit-Barrel.

Perhaps it was abbreviated because it wouldn't fit on the ballot paper, perhaps because it was just plain silly.

The Loonies were represented in Hartlepool this time by Sausage Supremo Headbanger. Despite the rather clever pun, or perhaps because of it, he managed just 162 votes.

BEFORE agreeably ending in Oswald's, we had been guests at Thirsk Races' evening meeting of the Stokesley Stockbroker and his generous colleagues at J M Finn & Co.

Knowing nothing of the supposed sport of kings, save only that it's a mug's game, the column bets by instinct, ignorance and association.

Hence Queen's Echo in the second, Jack Dawson - after retired Hartlepool postman John Dawson, king of the football ground hoppers - in the fourth and Master Bear (don't ask) in the last.

One of the bairns recommends a similar system involving anything with "gold" in the name - Golden Sacrament in the second, Golden Measure in the third - thus conclusively proving the Shakespearean philosophy about all that glisters.

For reasons more linked to stomach than heart, the evening's biggest investment was on Growler in the 8.05.

Chambers Dictionary simply supposes a growler to be a curmudgeonly old devil and a growlery, rather charmingly, to be "a retreat at all times of ill humour"; the Bloomsbury English reckons it to be a small iceberg with little above the water, the Oxford adds "four wheeled carriage" and "electro-magnet".

So how, in North-East parlance, did it come to a pork pie? Perhaps it is a matter into which Mr Arthur Pickering, head lad at Tyne Tees Television and master of the Pies-R-Squared website, may care to sink his teeth.

BY way of the Via Obscura, or whatever the Roman road is called, we are led to Punch and Judy and to Naples, which is where the old squabblers were born.

Monday was officially and universally Punch's 343rd birthday, that being the date in 1662 that Samuel Pepys first recorded seeing the puppets in Covent Garden.

"The best I ever saw, pretty and a great resort of gallants," Pepys noted, before retiring to the ale house to play with his flageolet.

Professor Brian Llewellyn in Darlington, the region's best Punch and Judy man, reacts with surprise when we ring to ask him what's so special about Monday - "You mean I'm going out for a curry with the lads in the domino team?" - before remembering that there was a piece in the fraternity's journal, perhaps inevitably called Punch Lines.

Professor Billy Llewellyn, his father, even preached at the 325th birthday service at St Paul's, Covent Garden.

Crocodile tears or no, Brian's a bit worried. "When he reads your column and realises I've forgotten his birthday," he says," Mr Punch is going to kill me."

...and finally, these currant affairs and farinaceous fantasies cannot pass without reference to the phrase "Taking the biscuit", the American equivalent of which is "taking the cake".

"Biscuit" is from the Old French, meaning cooked twice, but why should anyone risk taking it?

Nigel Rees, an etymologist for our times, defines it as "Take the honours, usually through an act of impudence or effrontery", adding the theory that it originates from a comment written in 17th century Latin beside the name of a beautiful innkeeper's daughter - "Ista capit biscottum", simply the best.

Rich tea digestive, there may be more of this dunk food next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2004