What's it all about, Humpty Dumpty?

Two hundred years ago, it said, the English naturalist Gilbert White wrote that all Hampshire owls hooted in the key of B flat.

Did West Highland owls hoot in the same key or was it (as he suspected) a minor key?

Inquiries - to whit, among the musical Smith brothers from Shildon - have failed to ascertain the key in which North-Eastern owls fly by night. Words to the wise much welcomed.

FOOTBALLING, almost inevitably, four of us travelled first class to Birmingham on Saturday. By booking well in advance and as a group, the return fare was £26 including tea, coffee, bacon butties, eccles cakes and sundry other benefits of the buffet.

Whilst it is a remarkable bargain, and whilst Virgin's bravura marketing is commendable, it is not the principal point of the story.

Just after Wakefield we noticed that a chatty and entirely courteous little lad - Year 3 at school, just turned eight - had seated himself at the adjacent table. He too, or so he said, was going to Birmingham.

Gently questioned by George Courtney - former Spennymoor junior school headmaster and international football referee, now Middlesbrough FC's director of community initiatives - he claimed to be on his own.

No one had put him on the train, no one was meeting him. He was going to a football match, he said, though he didn't know which one.

When it was apparent that there really was no one else there to look out for the vulnerable little scrap, George sought out the train manager, a chap called Kelvin who proved absolutely magnificent.

He talked affably to the bairn, brought him pop and crisps, ascertained not only that he hadn't a ticket but that he'd no real idea where or why he was going.

The Rev Leo Osborn, chairman of the Newcastle Methodist district and another of our foursome, will be singing Kelvin's praises in some appropriately-placed ears at Virgin.

Last we saw of him, the little kid was being led from New Street station in Birmingham by a very large policeman.

Subsequent enquiries revealed that British Transport Police had liaised with West Yorkshire police, met their colleagues at a motorway service station and handed him over. He is now back with his parents.

"We've never heard of a child so young just jumping on a train," says a Virgin spokesman. "Apparently he's wandered off before, he's a bit of an adventurer."

All's well, then. But what if he'd met some rather less accommodating people on the train? What if he'd been free to wander around Birmingham?

His parents hadn't reported him missing. Little wonder that we worry about our children.

FOR reasons now forgotten, a recent column confirmed that, near Bradford, there really was an Idle Workmen's Club. Ian McDougall adds the recollection that in the potted biographies of 1950s cricket annuals, D E V Padgett (Yorkshire) was always "born Idle."

BOWLING from the nursery end, we'd also been exploring the possible hidden meaning of nursery rhymes like Wee Willie Winkie, Goosey Goosey Gander and, probably, Humpty Dumpty. Like the symbolic egg, readers are split.

Humpty Dumpty, says Chris Eddowes in Hartlepool, was a representation of Cardinal Wolsey - "he certainly had a great fall." (Little Jack Horner also had something to do with the dissolution of the monasteries - and pulling out plums - she adds.)

Humpty Dumpty, says Kevin O'Beirne in Sunderland, was the name of a siege engine used by the Royalist forces attacking Gloucester during the English Civil War.

Sitting on the wall meant simply that Humpty was attacking the city's defences, the great fall came because sappers tunnelled out and undermined it.

All the king's horses and all the king's men is clearly a reference to the royalist forces. Couldn't put Humpty together again means, says Kevin - employing the strictly historical term - that it was knackered.

PERHAPS it is because we addressed the annual meeting of the Coundon Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons the other day - proposed the toast to the polliss, even - that George Blood, appreciatively in the audience, sends a veritable compendium of scams.

This mendacious miscellany has been e-mailed to him in the past fortnight from all parts of Africa, all - as they still say in certain parts of Middlesbrough - looking for business.

Most profess to be international bankers who've found unclaimed inheritances "floating" in old accounts and need to transfer huge amounts of US dollars elsewhere in exchange for a substantial cut.

All, crucially, seek telephone and bank account details. Most appear to have God (or his nominated representative) as personal adviser.

One writer asks for "blue cheep" investment - a budgerigar breeder, perhaps - another tells George that he needs his "strong assurance and trussing".

They are familiar by now and should not be touched with an electronic barge pole. It is perhaps in our new role of Felon Finder General, however, that he urges us to issue a warning on that which comes out of Africa.

As for George, the phrase about blood and stone comes to mind. Unlike some who do business in Middlesbrough, he won't be caught with his trousers down.

WHILST (as a reader suggests) Redcar and Cleveland College could pick a better time than Adult Learners Week to report in their literature that they've been "leant a bus", the moral of stones and glasshouses still applies.

Peter Sotheran, also in Redcar, draws attention to The Northern Echo report on May 6 about the replica of Captain Cook's Endeavour sailing into Rio. The crew, we said, included 39-year-old Jon Preston - "an ancestor of Captain Cook's family."

Since ancestor means "forefather", it's possible that Jon was a descendant. Or, adds Peter, can The Northern Echo really raise the dead?

A PS from Chris Eddowes who (via her husband) poses another 11+ maths question. "Dick has an index linked pension. How many years will it be before it all goes to pay his council tax. Dick lives in Hartlepool."

Published: 15/05/2002