IT has been a week of shoo-ins. Chelsea are a shoo-in for the Premiership, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a shoo-in for the papacy, Stuart Pearce is a shoo-in for the Manchester City manager's job.

"Are there any Labour candidates in the North-East who aren't shoo-ins?" a London media type asked me on Thursday.

It's a little phrase whose moment has come - and the wonderful thing about it is its fraudulent undertones.

It comes, of course, from the word shoo, which means to scare or drive away - properly, you can only shoo away fowls: you cannot shoo cats from your garden or children from your doorstep.

At the start of the 20th century, the Americans created the phrase shoo-in to describe a rigged horse race. The jockeys on the fancied horses grouped behind a no-hoper and chased it, or shooed it, over the winning line.

By the late 1930s, the Americans were applying the term to a politician who, no matter how poorly he ran his campaign, was bound to be elected - although the fraudulent aspect of the meaning was slowly lost.

Indeed, by 1967 the phrase was so well known that the Wall Street Journal turned it around. A candidate standing against a popular Congressman in the Harlem district of New York was running such a hopeless campaign that he was a shoo-out.

Next week's question, then, is whether Tony Blair is a shoo-in or Michael Howard is a shoo-out.

I WAS mulling over shoo-in on my way to a hustings on Wednesday night in Yarm. Am I going to hust, I mulled in another direction? Am I a huster? Will the hustees be husted by husters at the hustings? Will there be a hustation, and could it end in a hustment?

None of the above. It transpires that you can only use hustings as a noun because of its derivation from Old Norse.

At the very beginnings of language there were only two types of meeting. One was outdoors - a meeting, a mete or a moot - and the other was indoors. This was a h£s-ing - a thing in a house. Over time, this house-thing became a meeting where people put forward their cases, first in a legal sense and then in a political sense. At the end of a political house-thing, if you liked one person's case, you would either agree to nominate the person or give him a piece of paper - your vote.

All this was changed by the 1872 Ballot Act which introduced the secret ballot. Funny word, that ballot...

FOLLOWING my musings a fortnight ago about the demolition of Easington Colliery school, John Todd of Barton, an ex-Easingtonian, wrote with memories of extreme playground sports like mounty kitty, chain tiggy and tiggy-on-high ("pray you were near the railings or a drainpipe", he says).

He adds: "Every classroom had glazed tile walls to dad height, parquet flooring and double desks so if you stood up so did your deskmate."

John's father, Jack, taught at the school from 1936 to 1976, including in the fiercesomely-named Manual Instruction block where he took woodworking classes.

"The colliery in the 1950s was a bustling community," sighs John. "Shops, banks, pubs, three cinemas, clubs, coffee bars and the school was quite a feature.

"It appears doomed now, although in London, it would be snapped up for a warehouse or loft-style apartment development."

Easington Colliery is, though, many miles from London.