BADMINTON is the new curling. At the 2002 Winter Olympics, the nation unaccountably became gripped by the icy antics of skip Rhona Martin and her gold medal winning team of curlers.

Six million of us stayed up past midnight to watch them sweep to victory, and we quickly mastered the wonderful trivia of this weird game.

Curling, as we came to know, takes its name from the old Scottish verb "curr", which means "to grumble" - because when the granite stones slide across the ice they make a low, rumbling grumble.

The curlers' gold was Britain's first Winter Olympics gold since Torvill and Dean in 1984.

And now we have a new Torvill and Dean: Nathan Robertson and Gail Emms, who won Britain's best ever badminton medal on Thursday. A silver, but worth its weight in gold.

Badders has a reputation as a girlie game of patsy-patsy for those not able to play tennis. But this was sweaty, spiteful sport at its best - probably the finest encounter of the Olympics so far.

The British pair, so tender with each other, were humiliated by their Chinese opponents in the first game but somehow drew on un-British wells of immense courage and great skill to win the second. The shuttlecock was smashed with extraordinary violence, flying at up to 200mph and although the longest rally only lasted 33 seconds it did contain 39 rapid fire strokes.

And our heroes fell at the final hurdle, coming within a hairpin of taking the decisive third.

Eyes opened to the present, the past is worth looking at, too. Badminton appears to have been invented in Asia. In the 5th century the Chinese are said to have played something called Ti jian zi which involved kicking a shuttle with the feet.

As the game spread, English children played something called "battledore and shuttlecock". To play this game, children had to steal from the scullery and the study, because a battledore was a wooden utensil used for beating clothes, and a shuttlecock was a cork with feathers stuck in it.

The reason you stick feathers in a cork is, of course, obvious: how else do you store your best writing quills without damaging their tips.

The Asians were refining this game, adding an element of competition and, importantly, a net. When British soldiers colonised India they discovered it being played in the town of Poona. In the 1860s, the soldiers brought this game of "poona" home with them.

In 1873, the Duke of Beaufort held a garden party at his stately home, Badminton in Gloucestershire. To the delight of his guests, his daughters played a new game, poona, on the lawn.

It was even discovered that, in the pre-plastic age, the best feathers for a shuttlecock came from the left wing of a goose. The game quickly caught on, the rules adopted being those played at Badminton.

And so, Robertson and Emms can truly claim that badminton is coming home.

DARLINGTON station. Once there were 25 or so parking spaces off Parkgate, all always keenly contested by those dropping off passengers. In the name of progress, these 25 spaces have now been reduced to six - replaced by oceans of yellow paint which indicate empty disabled spaces.

Of course, the disabled must be catered for, but on four recent visits to the station, I have only seen two occupied disabled spaces. The rest have been unused while passengers have been struggling up the bank with their suitcases. Might as well take the car...