PERHAPS the greatest excitement at Norton and Stockton Ancients since the unfortunate affair with the hot dog and the armed response unit, the Albany Northern League football club has signed Apollo Ouedraogo, an Under 17 international from Burkina Faso.

The hot dog was mistaken for a semi-automatic, it may be recalled, though machine guns don't normally come with onions and mustard from a squirter.

That Ray Morton, the club's new manager, is himself a police inspector is entirely coincidental. He was lunching elsewhere at the time.

Apollo is now 24 and going to be a cracking goalkeeper, says Ray. The greater problem is the whereabouts of Burkina Faso, which isn't a club but a country.

A website reveals that it's among the world's poorest, a landlocked west African nation of 12m people which still faces problems of superstition, sorcery and one or two other things mentioned in yesterday's Backtrack column.

A further search discloses that the world has 192 independent countries, that three people claim to have done the set and that even some of the biggest - Myanmar (46m), Mali (10m) - seem surreptitiously to have sneaked onto the map since Gadfly charted O level geography. In those days, of course, the map seemed entirely to be red.

By way of a refresher course, readers are therefore invited to place the following ten countries in their respective necks of the world. Their whereabouts at the foot of the column.

Mauritania, Myanmar, Tajikistan, Benin, Micronesia, Burundi, Vanuatu, Marshall Islands, Bhutan and Nauru - which with just 10,000 people, is approximately the size of Norton but probably hasn't as good a goalkeeper.

SUCH global exploration would never have been a problem when all of us collected stamps. Now most youngsters appear to know nothing about philately - except, of course, that it gets you nowhere.

In Gadfly's loose leafed childhood, approvals weren't a parental pass-out but a breathlessly awaited set of ten-a-penny stamps, usually from somewhere near Goole.

The complete collector's kit contained a map of the world's stamp issuing nations, about three million stamps identically depicting the domed head of General Franco, a packet of stamp hinges, some tweezers and a magnifying glass which did precisely what its name suggested. It made things look twice as blurred.

Almost always, there was a "free" penny red, too. It seemed a wonderful bargain until we learned that there had been 72m penny blacks and that the penny red was 500 times more common.

Early suggestions, incidentally, were that Rowland Hill should put "a female head of great beauty" on his first stamp. The creep chose Queen Victoria, who doubtless was amused.

Though UK Philately is still alive and licking - "Philately is not just stamp collecting but much more than that" it claims - the hobby seems rather to have become unhinged.

The last place around here that you could buy stamp albums was Dresser's on Darlington High Row, the premises still for sale and decorated with pictures of the dingy skipper butterfly - an endangered species said still to thrive on the track of the former Shildon railway sidings.

We don't know any stamp collectors. Kids are game boys now.

THE world's rarest stamp, a one cent magenta issued in British Guyana in 1856, offers a semantic collectors' item, too. Two may survive, but one or both are thought to be clever fakes. If both are fake, however, is it possible to forge something which doesn't exist in the first place?

THE Daily Telegraph last week carried an obituary of Lord Martin Fitzalan-Howard, former High Sheriff of North Yorkshire and master of Carlton Towers, near Malton. There is but the slightest perforation between this and the preceding items.

Fitzalan-Howard's great uncle had gone bankrupt. Perhaps mindful of it, mused the Telegraph, he was a man of frugal ways.

Once, hoping to salvage a stamp which the postmark has missed, he began to soak it in a bowl of water beneath a running tap but somehow became distracted.

"The resulting flood," noted the obit, "brought down the ceiling below."

STILL astride the childhood hobby horse, Eric Smallwood from Middlesbrough cops the two large steam engine photographs by the check-out at Morrison's on Morton Park, Darlington. One's the Class B1 "Darlington" - name plate on display at George's new stadium - the other number 2848. What's the local link with that one, Eric wonders? Train spotters may be able to underline it.

ANOTHER smart piece of spotting. Having previously noted a driving school called El Paso, Alastair Gilmour in Whickham was amused to see a building services company's van in Gateshead. The firm was called Arc n' Saw.

RATHER fewer marks from Big Chief I Spy - whatever happened to HIM? - for Harry Watson in Darlington.

His first e-mail arrived early last Tuesday. "Was it you winning Countdown on Channel 4 last night? My wife thought it was but was in and out making the tea and I was half asleep following exertions in the garden.

"You won and will be on again tonight as the winning champion."

The column's slightly incredulous return e-mail - along the lines of never having seen Countdown but that he must have been an awfully good looking feller - was in turn acknowledged the following afternoon.

"Unfortunately," wrote Harry, "you lost."

...and finally, Lynn Briggs in Darlington tells of the woman who asks at the post office for 50 stamps for her Christmas cards.

"What denomination?" asks the assistant.

"Oh my gosh, has it come to this?" says the woman. "Best give me six Catholic, 12 Methodist and 32 Church of England."

Published: 20/08/2003