THIS column is being written on Monday afternoon on a one way ticket to Kings Cross. An hour behind time, the train overflows. It is as if people have been panic buying monthly returns, as they have most other things, to flee the south bound blizzard.

There is no restaurant car, not even for a late lunch.

The hope is to return overnight on the bus, specifically the Chester-le-Street Juniors team coach, but the forecast frowns fearfully upon such ambition. As the unfortunate Captain Oates once observed, I may be gone some time.

THE News of the World two weekends ago carried a report by its deputy political editor about a "new menace" - the Baghdad Boil - facing British troops in Iraq.

For former senior police officer Matt Hutchinson, the "new menace" simply re-opened some very nasty old wounds. Matt, with the Durham force from 1939-72, also saw RAF service in the Middle East between 1942-45. Six months after resuming constabulary duty in West Hartlepool, he looked so ill - directing traffic on Binns' corner - that a colleague replaced him and told him to go home.

Suffering malaria symptoms, he spent four weeks in the Cameron Hospital. When things didn't improve, a second opinion was sought from Professor Hume in Newcastle.

(Matt sends the story from his memoirs. "Professor Hume's father was Cardinal Basil Hume," he writes, which - given the nature of Cardinal Hume's calling - may be supposed a genealogical error.)

Professor Hume consulted in his turn, conducted a sternum puncture and other indignities, finally confirmed kala azar, otherwise lieshmaniosis, aka - then as now - the Baghdad Boil.

A disease with a long incubation period, it is transmitted by sandflies (which must on no account be confused with Gadflies). Most of the subsequent treatment is unsuitable for breakfast time consumption.

Suffice that Matt was transferred from Newcastle General to the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool, weighed nine stones when finally discharged and spent 11 months off work.

He retired as a chief inspector in Darlington, now lives in Middleton Tyas, near Richmond, and will be a still-vigorous 87 in May.

Though it can still be pretty serious when matters come to the Baghdad Boil, treatment has much improved since Matt Hutchinson's military service. A job for a lance corporal, no doubt.

HERE is a passenger announcement. The couple across the aisle are conversing in Chinese. In 20 minutes sporadic eavesdropping, the only English phrases have been "register office", "beady eye" and "George Reynolds." Whatever can it mean?

FOUR mph through Yarm-on-Tees the other day, the column's pedestrian progress was halted by the street sign for Spitalfields and adjacent avenues. It looked the sort of estate where footballers' wives kick their heels.

Spitalfields was probably the site of an old hospital, or some such, but what of The Larun Beat and The Royd and, most mysterious of all, whereby hangs Sideling Tails?

Even Mr John Briggs, the only Internet researcher paid exclusively in ham and peas pudding sandwiches, has been unable to address an explanation, merely adding that there's a lady on Spitalfields with a babywear business and that his own favourite is Friars Pardon, in Hurworth.

Much closer to the wind, the column's remains Bleak Terrace, Cockfield.

Streetwise readers are invited to join the Larun Beat or to offer any other explanations. Other examples of the estate of the nation also greatly welcomed.

ANNIE Laity, a high priestess among caterers, has been telling us about unexpected problems at the Yorkshire Festival of Food and Drink. They didn't want to let her sell Cornish pasties. To add yet more spice, the local MP is now getting her teeth into the problem.

Annie, to whom everyone is "my flower" or "me lovely", is as Cornish as clotted cream. She runs the Courtyard restaurant in Bedale, North Yorkshire, and turns a perfect pasty. "As akin to what normally passes for a Cornish pasty as Penzance is to Peterlee," the Eating Owt column once observed.

The Yorkshire folk, about whom there is a well known saying, weren't impressed. They tried to insist that they should be renamed Yorkshire pasties. "A committee lady got quite annoyed with me," says Annie.

"I pointed out that they were selling lots of Belgian chocolates, at least my pasties were English. They're made with ingredients mainly bought in Yorkshire and they bring lots of people to Bedale."

Anne McIntosh, Ryedale's MP, has promised help if the problem persists. If it does, Annie vows to change by deed poll her name to Mrs Cornish. "I love Yorkshire but this is my birthright. I'm not giving it up for anyone."

WE again interrupt this journey with news that a "technical fault" yet again means there will be no hot drinks - and James Watt thought he'd cracked that one 200 years ago. It would never have happened in the steam age.

HIS attention span working perfectly, Tom Cockeram from Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, heightens an error in last week's piece on the Forth Bridge. Trains cross 150 times a day not, as we said, 150 times a year.

We all make mistakes, of course, an inevitability which last week caused confusion in Bob Jones's happy home in Darlington.

A left hand page in last Tuesday's paper proclaimed it to be Tuesday, January 20, the right hand page said it was Wednesday, November 20.

"We know we shouldn't believe everything we read in newspapers," adds Bob, "but the date?"

HAD up to here? So were readers of last week's column, invited to punctuate "Smith where Jones had had had had had had had had had had had the examiners approval."

Lots wrote to prove that they could do it, wondering only if there were one or more examiners. Several recalled teasing the same conundrum half a century ago.

Barbara Brown from Darlington, who in Germany taught English as a foreign language, remembered quoting it to students who queried the standard use "had had".

"They were rather disorientated," she says, though practice may have made pluperfect.

Earlier still, Tom Dobbin in Durham recalls almost being thrown out of the 11+ examination for laughing when asked to punctuate "The donkey said the driver needs some carrots."

Alan Woods in Middlesbrough is among those offering two solutions. "I suspect that on the basis of nothing more than a 40-year-old O-level, both are better than anything attempted by the average university student of today."

Jean Foster in Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland, adds the old favourite about Pig and and and and and whistle. "My dad loved that sort of thing," she says.

So, two punctilious possibilities. "Smith, where Jones had had 'had had', had had 'had'. 'Had had' had had the examiner's approval." (We shall assume that there was only one examiner.)

The other is "Smith, where Jones had 'had', had had 'had had'...

Had enough? Well, almost.

WHITHER the white-out? Where blows the ill wind? The team bus was up the A1 like a ferret up a five foot seam, in bed by 3.30am and living to fright another day.

They now reckon Tuesday night's the night. Resolute, if not necessarily single-minded, the column returns next week.

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