IN all its serendipitous sashays down the broad sweep of Inconsequentiality Avenue, the column had never once imagined that it might be considering the more personal arrangements of Ms Anne Boleyn.

Did she really, last week's column asked, have six fingers on her left hand?

Did she also, we might have added, have a third breast?

The unexpected autopsy had begun with debate over the etymology of the phrase "left footer", a colloquialism for Roman Catholic pursued at a distance by Phil Westberg in South Africa.

(Phil's dad is still in Darlington. If not to refresh the parts that other beers cannot reach, then perhaps to delay the cranium's imminent implosion, he has kindly dropped in four bottles of Castle Lager, brought hither from Johannesburg.)

Kevin O'Beirne in Sunderland seeks to confirm the "rudimentary extra digit", reckons the third breast was probably no more than a supernumerary nipple but that together they were enough for Henry to suggest the black arts and to have his queen beheaded at 29.

Kevin's also keen to get off his chest the story that Elizabeth I's body exploded before burial, but perhaps we can leave that one to rest.

From Bishop Auckland, the perhaps pseudonymous Parthenon Jones - "from the Greek, an old ruin which has lost its marbles, just about describes me" - refers us to Lady Antonia Fraser's description of an unexpected growth area on the Queen's hand.

Tom Purvis, also in Sunderland, quotes from Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives: "She was rather tall of stature with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled by jaundice.

"She had a projecting tooth under her upper lip and on her right hand, six fingers.

"There was a large wen under her chin and to hide its ugliness, she wore high dresses."

Tom's sympathetic towards the poor lass. "A minor malformation of one fingertip seems probable, and maybe one or two small moles but never a disaster.

"One man's beauty spot is hardly another man's wen."

PRIVATE Lives by Mark Bryant is unequivocal, however. Henry VIII's second wife, five months pregnant at her coronation, had three breasts and six fingers on her right hand, it says.

She was reviled by the public, adds Bryant, greeted almost silently after the coronation and commonly called a "goggle-eyed whore".

Sub-titled "Curious facts about the famous and infamous", Mr Bryant's tome wisely excludes anyone in a position to sue.

Among journalism's oldest, if not necessarily safest, maxims is that it's impossible to libel the dead.

ERNIE Reynolds, who first put left foot forward, writes in support of his Goosey Goosey Gandering - remember the old man who wouldn't say his prayers?

There may also be more than there's generally cracked up to be in the legend of Humpty Dumpty, he adds. "It's difficult to think that all the king's horses and all the king's men were trying to mend a smashed up boiled egg that had fallen off a wall."

No it's not.

PRINCIPALLY, however, the column has become a guardian of Her Majesty's English and was therefore delighted to receive from the Coundon Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons a specially produced lapel badge proclaiming "Keeper of the Queen's apostrophe."

Perhaps it's also why someone has sent a glossy, 12-page brochure outlining Durham City Council's "Performance Plan" for 2002.

"As a modern local authority, it is our intention to continue to improve the quality of our services year on year," writes Council leader Maurice Crathorne in the introduction.

They first need to improve the performance plan, scattered with grammatical gaffes and careless proof reading. It is improbable, for example, that Coxhoe Leisure Centre has won a silver meal. In an area of continuous improvement, "Medowfield" may not recognise itself, either.

WE all make mistakes, of course, which is probably why Anne Gibbon in Darlington sends whence it came last Tuesday's Echo report on "sleep depravation" causing long-term health problems.

We are reminded of Under Milk Wood: "The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the night and the jolly rogered sea."

Bad to worse, as the insomniac depraved might suppose, the paper also carried a For Sale ad for "Etherley Littery Institute."

Those responsible will surely be brought to book.

LAST week's joke about the elephant and the Ashington turtle - the one about "turtle recall" - reminded Ian Forsyth in Durham of happy tea times listening to Children's Hour on the Home Service.

For some reason, Ian recalls, the North-East shared a radio frequency with Northern Ireland - "in the football results, Crook Town and Spennymoor rubbed shoulders with Ards and Glentoran."

"Regional" programmes included Brogeen the Leprechaun and Ould Dan the Pedlar Man, balance provided by Biggles stories read by a chap with a marked mid-Northumberland brogue.

Ian still remembers the introduction: "Noo, Ginger and Erlgy..."

Has anyone else, he wonders, turtle recall of those former family favourites?

SITTING comfortably with the North Home Service also stirred a story long since told the column by Macdonald Hobley, among BBC Television's first on-screen announcers.

In 1948 he was still on the wireless, however, still wearing formal dress behind an unseeing microphone and charged with introducing the world's first party political broadcast.

It was to be Sir Stafford Cripps, then Home Secretary. Aware of the importance of the occasion, Hobley was uncharacteristically nervous but got through the preamble.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he concluded, "it is now my privilege to introduce the Home Secretary, Sir Stifford Crapps."

THANKS to all who responded to last week's extracts from the 1958 11+ paper.

Stella Andrews in Darlington didn't realise until belatedly going to university - five years ago - that the pass mark for girls was higher than that for boys "because boys catch up later".

Unfair, she says, inarguably - but can it really be true?

ESSAYS into the English language also took us last week to Saltaire, Sir Titus Salt's "model" mill town in West Yorkshire.

The Stokesley Stockbroker recalls that Saltaire had Britain's biggest - and probably most handsome - Congregational church. Hails of Hartlepool is moved to send Saltaire Cricket Club's centenary brochure from 1969, when former Darlington goalkeeper Tony Moor was in the first team.

The great Sydney Barnes, who in 27 tests took 189 wickets at 16.43, three times took ten in an innings for Salts and three times claimed a hat trick.

Jim Laker, no less renowned, also benefited from a pinch of Salts but was better known as a batsman.

Ron Hails recalls that, whilst watching a match at Saltaire, he fell into conversation about Peter Kippax, the former Durham leg spinner who was Hartlepool's professional at the time.

Kippax lived nearby. "See that church steeple four to the left, that's Idle," said his new friend. "Kippy lives there."

There really is an Idle Workmen's Club, an' all, but that's another story.

...so finally, the column which revealed that "episcopal" is an anagram of Pepsi-Cola can now add - courtesy of the Upper Sixth at Richmond School - that "Presbyterians" is an anagram of Britney Spears (or possibly vice-versa).

On that youthful note, we now depart for a week's holiday and an attempt to address the correspondence mountain.

Inconsequentiality Avenue re-opens to the public on May 15.