Sweet sorrows and a cracking contest

There isn't one, though there is a North-East connection.

The rather moreish sweeties are named after the Austrian village where, in 1903, they were cooked up by August Storck (which hitherto may have been the name for butter).

The Sorrows of Werther was first written in 1774 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, described in a synopsis as "a tragic masterpiece which attained an instant and lasting success".

Werther's original, as John Briggs in Darlington suggests, was thought loosely to be based on Goethe's own unfortunate experiences with the opposite sex.

Werther was a lovelorn artist whose unrequited passion for the lovely Lotte became so unbearable that he shot himself. The book, adds another doubtless learned reviewer, addresses the meaning of love and death and redemption.

"A character who struggles to reconcile his artistic sensibilities with the demands of the objective world," says a third, no less pompously.

Among those Goethe's book is said to have influenced was "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley - "Werther" one of four books which the monster found in a sack and which ultimately drove him to suicide.

Another of the four was Milton's Paradise Lost. If the monster thought it hard going, he should have tried doing the damn thing for A-level.

Phil Westberg in South Africa, among the column's further flung readers, spent all last Wednesday morning trying to discover how the monster died. Apparently he cast himself away on an iceberg, new meaning to the phrase about going with the floe.

Then Thackeray, whose folks came from Hampsthwaite, near Harrogate - "they were tall, thin people," he once wrote - attempted what a sub-editor might term a complete re-write. Perhaps he'd read some of those smarty pants synopses and wanted to simplify things a little:

Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter,

Would you know how first he met her?

She was cutting bread and butter.

Charlotte was a married lady,

And a moral man was Werther,

And for all the wealth of Indies

Would do nothing for to hurt her.

So he sigh'd and pin'd and ogled

And his passion boil'd and bubbled,

Till he blew his silly brains out

And no more was by it troubled

Charlotte, having seen his body

Borne before her on a shutter,

Like a well conducted person

Went on cutting bread and butter.

There can be no question about which is the real masterpiece. Original and second best.

MARTIN Snape in Durham not only knew the whole, sad story but - realising that in German "Werther" rhymes with "Goethe" - summed it in four lines:

If you want to find young Werther

He is in a book by Goethe,

Thackeray, with his ready wit

Gaily made a mock of it.

THACKERAY only made an appearance because his entry is immediately above Margaret Thatcher's in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations - prompting former Redcar and Cleveland Council leader David Walsh to recall one of the Iron Lady's less malleable remarks.

"Any man over the age of 30 who still travels by bus is a failure in life," she famously observed.

David's another non-driver. "That's you and me taken care of," he says.

SINCE we have been discussing the Easter origins of the word "jarp" - as in doing your end in - a photographer was despatched on Monday evening to the world egg jarping championships at Peterlee Cricket Club.

Best laid plans notwithstanding, the jarping world appears to be contracting.

Only 16 went to work, mostly from Peterlee itself, though organiser Roy Simpson reckons that one chap had travelled from the north end of Easington Colliery which has an American sounding name. He just forgets what it is.

It was won for the second time in five years by Geoff Smedley, who lives approximately where third man should stand and thus was able to get the trophy home without too much trouble.

"He's spent all that time trying to get his style right again," says Roy.

We are also grateful to Pauline Hustwick from Scorton, near Richmond, who has cooked up two formidable looking eggs - not jarpers, she insists, but boolies.

When the cricket season starts on April 23, perhaps we can bool them at Peterlee.

ANOTHER of life's little mysteries, last week's column wondered about the correct spelling of the community near Bishop Auckland known sometimes as St Helen's.

Sunday best, should it be St Helen Auckland or St Helen's Auckland - and is the apostrophe, as Ivor Wade in Darlington supposes possible, there not just to indicate possession but to differentiate between "that place in Lancashire where they make glass and play Rugby League"?

Ivor spent the first 30 years of his life opposite the church of St Helen, in the village then known as St Helen's Auckland, or - more usually - St Helen's.

In his 1863 Royal Ordnance Survey map it's shown as St Helen Auckland, however, and the nearby village now usually known as South Church is St Andrew Auckland.

Ivor prefers St Helen's. "We should have a people's campaign," he insists, "to get the beloved apostrophe reinstated."

UP the road in West Auckland stood Millbank School, known locally - as last week's column also supposed - as Titty Bottle School.

None so far knows why, but Stan Johnson reckons that the small green between Raby Gardens and Cockton Hill Road in Bishop Auckland was known as Titty Bottle Park "because women with their offspring would sit there talking while feeding the infants their bottle".

It still doesn't explain Millbank School. Suck it and see, can anybody help?

...and finally, Pete Crawforth in Chilton reports that on a recent holiday in Cornwall he discovered a pair of handcuffs in a camping shop window and has ever since puzzled over their purpose - "maybe to hold the tent flaps together?" - on a field trip.

Captive audience, readers may have ideas of their own before - pomposity and circumstance - the column returns in a fortnight.

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Published: ??/??/2004