COOL as you like, last week's column de-iced The Ballad of Eskimo Nell, and more of that importunate Innuit in a moment. Shocked by this journalistic journey to the frozen frontiers of respectability, several readers have suggested that we'll be raising the Good Ship Venus next - the Sex Pistols were there first, apparently - whilst Gillian Wootten wonders about the Ball of Kirriemuir.

Kirriemuir is a small town and former linen weaving centre near Forfar, the birthplace both of Peter Pan author J M Barrie and of the late Bon Scott, a member of the heavy metal band AC/DC.

A museum is dedicated to J M Barrie but not, for some reason, to Bon Scott. Clearly, he is one of the lost boys.

It is for neither of them that the wee town is best remembered, however, but for the Ball of Kirriemuir, a version of which exists on the town's official website:

The five and twenty auld wifes cam doon fra' Aviemore

In the middle o' the Lancers they all fell through the floor.

Singin' fa'll dae it this time, fa'll dae it noo

The ane that it did it last time canna dae it noo

Stirring stuff, and nothing more suggestive than a line about "cuddlin' in the cornyaird, kissin' 'mang the ricks." As the nudge-wink metre may indicate, however, it is not the best-known version nor Aviemore the preferred starting point:

Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness

When the ball was over....

John Briggs and Lynn de Prator, who these days act as the column's researchers for no greater reward than a round of ham and pease pudding sandwiches in the Brit, managed to e-mail the official version but were stopped in their tracks on the alternative. The censorious electronic server at our end declined to accept the message - rejected, it said, by Content Security.

Offending nature of the content? "Rude words".

It is probably just as well, but other correspondents should take heed: we have an exceptionally sanctimonious server.

AN entirely proper e-mail from Frank Tims questions the origins of The Mighty Quinn - he was an Eskimo, too - the hero of a Bob Dylan song which became a 1960s number one for Manfred Mann.

We had supposed a narcotic sub-plot: Frank sniffs a different trail.

"I recall seeing a movie called The Savage Innocents in which Anthony Quinn played the part of an Eskimo who couldn't understand the strange rantings of a missionary who had been sent to save him from his savage ways."

The Time Out Film Guide more or less confirms it. "The 1960 film charts the hardships suffered by Quinn the Eskimo in his struggle to survive not only in the harsh conditions of the Artic (sic) but against the invasion of western 'civilisation', embodied by Christianity, capitalism and rock and roll."

The late Anthony Quinn, Frank adds, really was the Mighty Quinn - "he procreated into his eighties." As for the poor old missionary, he died of a harpoon through the heart.

A CALLER from Durham (who had otherwise best be nameless) recalls that the Manfreds' big hit was immediately plagiarised by Newcastle United football fans in honour of Wyn Davies, the Magpies' centre forward from 1966-71.

Davies, a proud Welshman known sometimes as Wyn the Leap, was Newcastle's record buy when signed for £80,000 from Bolton Wanderers. Though he only managed 40 goals in 181 Football League games, the Gallowgate End - however ungrammatically - loved him:

Come on without, come on within,

You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Wyn....

He will be 60 next birthday. When last heard of, the Mighty Wyn was a baker in Bolton.

HOW interesting, adds Rob Williams in Newcastle, that Nasa is offering pictures of the Eskimo Nebula - www.spaceflightnow.com

Whether there is a connection between Eskimo Nell and Eskimo Nebula, or whether the nebula is the domicile of some interstellar Nell, Rob is unable to say. "It's pretty, though," he adds.

THIS scandalous line in column writing was begotten - almost innocently - by David Armstrong in Redcar. It is he who now returns to it.

"Isn't it amazing how a couple of throwaway lines one week can produce almost a whole column the week after?", he writes, though Gadfly regulars shouldn't find it amazing at all.

In David's RAF days, the ubiquitous Nell was stationed at Cardington, Padgate, Compton Bassett, Cold Hesleden (there was an RAF Cold Hesleden?) and even as far as Killand Point, Northern Ireland.

Perchance, he is also organising a 1940s singalong at Redcar RAFA Club, his memory having difficulty distinguishing between the "official" words and those more frequently favoured by Our Boys.

The trouble is, says David, that the alternatives can't really appear on the song sheet."Isle of Capri has a different version, for example, as has The Quartermaster's Store - and as for Poor Little Angeline, the less said about her the better."

BERT Draycott, world champion spoons player - he helps launch Trimdon Folk festival at the Fox and Hounds on September 3 - recalls learning Eskimo Nell at the Army PT school in Aldershot, around 1949.

"The crack at the time was that it came from the pen of Rudyard Kipling," adds Bert, from Fishburn. "Does anyone know?"

Though it was Kipling who axiomatically observed that the female of the species is more deadly than the male - something clearly true of dear old Nell - it still seems improbable.

David Armstrong's mucky little hare may have a little way to run yet.

JUST before the peroration, an interesting note in The Times on the etymology of the word "drongo", originally an Australian term of abuse.

Its origins, says The Times, were with an Aussie racehorse of the 1920s which failed to make the frame in 37 starts, despite often being highly fancied.

The horse, adds the Oxford English Dictionary, had a "certain claim to fame". Drongo became a synonym for a loser.

These days, of course, Quixall Crossert - trained near Stokesley by the wonderfully patient Ted Cain - has a still greater claim to fame. Last week, the horse marked 100 unsuccessful starts.

Will "Quixall" become an English term of abuse, or shall we get to that bridge when we Crossert?

...and finally, the magazine of St Andrew's Church in Chilton Moor, near Houghton-le-Spring - much more of which in Saturday's At Your Service column - tells of a lady who over several bedtimes tried to teach her three-year-old daughter the Lord's Prayer.

At last, the little one seemed ready to go solo. Mum listened proudly, her daughter word-perfect until near the end.

"Lead us not into temptation," piped the child, "but deliver us some e-mails...."

The Gadfly column is likewise eternally grateful for its e-mails, as for all other correspondence. If in the near future it concerns young ladies from Inverness or the re-launch of the Good Ship Venus, however, it might be best to put a stamp on it.