AMONG the curious things about the Albany Northern League - football, understand - is that you can be in a crowd of 100, buy a half time meat draw ticket and be approximately 10,000 off the stewing steak.

In almost eight years as League chairman I've won just once, Tow Law Town v Taunton Town, March 21, 1998. The prize was a box of fruit, the subsequent outcry so tumultuous I gave it back.

It was therefore a very considerable surprise last week to learn that the column had twice got lucky, and to a total of around £200,000.

The first e-mail arrived on Monday from Lucky Day International, awarding a "lump sum payment" of 200,000 euros. The second, from Gravity International - serious stuff, then - announced an 80,000 euro windfall. Both prizes were in the "second category".

The Lucky Day award had been drawn from 20,000 company and three million private e-mail addresses, Gravity from 25,000 and 30m.

Beats a few bananas and a bunch of grapes, doesn't it? Change of fortune, or what?

Well, maybe not quite - and amid the legalese, the legerdemain and the that's your lotto lies a clue.

Lucky Day requires a "refundable" fee of between 300-800 euros from non-residents of Holland so that the award might be processed. Somewhere along the line, the Gravitas train will doubtless seek something similar.

Both ask for secrecy from winners - "part of our security protocol", they agree. One thing's common to all: only a prize idiot would take another step.

WE'D mentioned something similar before Christmas, after a complaint from the Rev Frank Campbell. Frank, a Church of Scotland minister who produces football programmes for Evenwood Town and Prudhoe Town, was told he'd won a fortune by a German national lottery and tried, perhaps unwisely, to take them on at their own game.

Not even a man of God should play devil's advocate with these guys.

Two days before Christmas he was told he'd won another huge prize. "Normally," he wrote to his local MSP, "the angel song of peace and goodwill to all men is one to which I heartily and without reservation subscribe.

"This Christmas, this incandescent village cleric is prepared to make an exception."

Frank has also written - again - to the procurator fiscal and to the trading standards officer. "A load of unadulterated hogwash," he concludes, and doubtless it is. As probably they say in Tow Law, you can't win them all.

THE greater scandal, of course, is the misuse of the English language, something for which Dutch e-mails may perhaps be excused but Mr Michael Howard may emphatically not.

Last week's column noted Peter Sotheran's irritation at the Conservative leader's "persistent" use of a plural possessive pronoun with a singular subject, as in "every child wants security for their parents".

The reaction may best be summed up by the heading on Tim Stahl's e-mail: "Plural possessives and plural obsessives". In short, readers disagree.

Ian Forsyth in Durham quotes Sir Ernest Gowers, he of the Complete Plain Words, published in 1958. The use of "they" and "their" as the equivalent of "he and she" or "his and hers" was "common in speech" and "not unknown in serious writing", Gowers concluded, though at the time he thought it too early to be officially adopted.

Pete Winstanley, near Chester-le-Street, quotes Collins Dictionary that "everyone did their best" is acceptable though, like Peter Sotheran, he considers it "lamentably sloppy".

TIM Stahl is an orthopaedic surgeon at Darlington Memorial Hospital. For Christmas he bought his two secretaries Lynne Truss's top-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves - the punctilious guide to punctuation - and "recognising myself so clearly from page five" has yet to find the courage to hand the gifts over.

Page five is Ms Truss's opening confessional. She is an unreconstructed stickler, someone who screams at the construction "Mr Blair was stood" instead of "Mr Blair was standing".

"We are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families," she writes.

Mr Stahl has read the books, knows the symptoms and feels able to offer a diagnosis. Michael Swan in Practical English Usage (1995) claimed that "their" - for example - had in that context been common in educated speech for centuries. The Oxford Guide to English Usage agrees.

"If Mr Sotheran is irritated," says Mr Stahl, "then he should stop scratching".

STILL at Darlington Memorial, Peter Crawforth from Chilton - while grateful for the care given his wife - was puzzled by her appointment card. "The United Bristol Healthcare NHS Trust" it said on the front. Is there something, wonders Peter, that they're not being told?

TRYING surgically to join together health care and good grammar, which let no man put asunder, last week's column raised an eyebrow at the "Officer's mess" sign outside the Duchess of Kent Military Hospital on Catterick Garrison.

Though the hospital is being downgraded, there may yet be more than one officer.

As Martin Snape in Durham points out, however, we were mistaken to question the "materiel depot" up the road. Materiel is defined by the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as "the articles, supplies, machinery etc of an army, navy or business."

Martin may have the last word. "Those of us who are not military men should perhaps beware of jumping to conclusions when passing through an army camp."

JIM Ferguson from Bishop Auckland was an RAF man, bomber navigator in the last war. Made of the right materiel, as it were.

When he died last August, we recalled his splendid story of the so-called gooly chits, given to air crew in the Middle East lest they be captured by the Bedou.

Being caught by the Arabs could be so painful, indeed, that they were in the habit of removing the prisoner's testicles and stuffing them in his mouth.

The gooly chit, backed by a pound note, promised to pay the bearer a handsome sum in gold if the captive and his dignity were returned intact.

Properly acknowledged - "one of the war's more bizarre stories" - the tale has now been picked up by The Oldie, a magazine for those of sensible years.

It is possible, however, to detect a note of cynicism and they should forthwith be disabused of it. We were cousins; Jim didn't just write about them, he sent one here. A load of gooly chit it's not.

...and finally, a piece on Bishops of Durham in this week's Church Times notes that bishops in the early church pulled one another's beards and threw benches at the heretics.

Under the headline "The Jenkins effect" it notes that both the new Bishop of Durham and the newish Archbishop of Canterbury have facial hair - "a tremendous promotion of beards in the upper echelons of the episcopate".

Dr Rowan William's beard is said to be "long and entirely tuggable", the conservative Dr Tom Wright's "too short to offer good handfuls to a liberal".

The Archbishop of York, thank God, remains entirely clean shaven.