Love at first bite

Gadfly, ever glad handed, will attempt to give away his copy in approximately two paragraphs from now.

The stuff soars, sales up 30 per cent every year. There's a Spam Fan Club, a Spam biography, Great with Spam wine, Spam earrings and - only in Korea for now - Spam in a presentation gift box.

Ms Patten offers Spam and pepper quiche, chicken cordon bleu (with Spam), Thai Spam cakes, even Spam steaks in port wine.

The question to win this sought-after prize could hardly be easier: If all the tins ever sold were laid end to end, how many times would they encircle the earth? Usual address, e-mail whatever. A winner in the pink next week.

ANOTHER reason for entering this wonderful competition is that the prize will be delivered by the postman. No need to travel to Darlington to collect it.

Things may not be quite the same at Radio Cleveland where, we hear, staff have received a memo urging them to invite contest winners to come into the studio to collect their BBC bounty.

Local radio prizes are notoriously nondescript. Sometimes, adds the memo candidly, the cost of postage exceeds the value of the prize.

Station manager David Peel is on attachment. Mark Seaman, his stand-in, tells Gadfly that the guidance is intended only for people in the Middlesbrough area. "We'd just like to see their faces in the studio, that's all," he insists.

Though he denies that it is another of the finger-in-the-Dyke economies that have shaken Broadcasting Houses to their fundamentals. Mr Seaman's example is indicative: "People have said that their cereal bowl arrived in 5,000 pieces. It wouldn't happen if they collect it."

FEBRUARY 6, 1952 was a momentous day in history. That morning's edition of The Northern Echo, however, seemed chiefly to be taken with the trial at Durham Assizes of Louis Arnold Bloom, a 35-year-old Hartlepool solicitor accused of murdering his mistress.

The North-East was covered in snow drifts up to 14 feet deep, police were concerned about "certain undesirable classes of customer" in Darlington pubs, Bishop Auckland's Bob Hardisty was tipped to become manager of the British Olympic football team and Douglas, Blackpool FC's mascot, had been found in a west end theatre dressing room.

Douglas, a duck, had gone missing during the derby with Preston North End. The Ministry of Agriculture had intervened.

To a retrospective eye, however, the most telling headline - spotted by my colleague Alex McFadzean - is the one we now reproduce.

This, apparently, was the Dome of Discovery on the South Bank Festival site. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

ALSO amid the archives, John Phelan from Howden-le-Wear sends a "six- years ago" item from The Northern Despatch of July 22, 1950, concerning the arrest in Chicago of Robert Dernach for failing to pay his hotel bill.

Poor old Dernach claimed to have spent £1,500 in ten days, almost entirely on blondes. "Everywhere I looked there were blondes," he pleaded, "and always they were thirsty and hungry."

When arrested, his assets amounted to two pence. "Times don't change," muses John, and only a blonde would deny that he had a fair point.

AWARE of the windmill at which the column most frequently - some would say fruitlessly - tilts, Redcar and Cleveland council leader David Walsh sends a copy of a meticulously punctuated Parliamentary early day motion.

"This house believes that it's time to rescue the apostrophe from its current state of abuse and neglect; deplores the way that it is routinely mutilated in publications by public bodies, companies and in advertisers' campaigns; asserts its crucial role in establishing meaning, especially when it's important to understand its importance, or to distinguish the one from the many; and believes it is the Government's duty to launch a campaign to restore the apostrophe to its proper place before it's too late."

Eric Smallwood, meanwhile, sends a leaflet for this month's "Hartlepool Business Showcase" on the Marina - which among other violations of the English language refers several times to "new idea's" - not to mention something called an extragravaganza.

Hawk eyed Clarice Middleton in Richmond spotted a Tyne Tees Television caption for Adult Learner's Week, suggesting that someone hasn't learned nearly enough. The early day motion, incidentally, has quietly been put back fifty years.

ANOTHER oddity: strolling ecstatically along the Great Aycliffe Way last week, the John North column came across an information board promising butterflies like the ringlet, comma and small copper. None of our dictionaries, however, defines the comma as anything more substantial than a punctuation mark.

Unless lepidopterists know of this bright elusive butterfly, could this be Newton Aycliffe's first recorded sighting of a council painter who gets full marks for sign writing but none whatsoever for dictation? REGISTERING their alertness, readers continue to spot unusual car numbers.

Ian Andrew in Lanchester noticed a "Land Rover type" with the plate 1 BAT - presumably a Durham County cricketer, he supposes, but perhaps an altogether humbler toiler? Pete Winstanley saw a van owned by Cedar Tree and Landscaping Services with the registration D119 POO, at first taken by his daughter to read Dig Poo.

"Clearly," he says, "a firm which recognises the horticultural value of farmyard manure."

AND finally, with the inexorable approach of July 31 a personal puzzle remains no nearer resolution. Writ large in the column's diary that day, for reasons that long have resisted imagination, is the single word "Wokingham". Wokingham is a town in Berkshire, said in a recent survey to be the least deprived area in England. Marconi once visited, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift helped write a poem about Sweet Molly Meg in drooling tribute to the barmaid at the Rose Inn, silk making and bull baiting once thrived and the Wokingham Blacks were a notorious gang of highwaymen.

None of it, however, posits the least reason for going there. A trawl through the telephone directories reveals no Walter Wokingham (or whoever) who might expect a knock next Monday; graphologists have discounted accusations (our handwriting being what it is) that the entry may actually say "Wolsingham".

It is a genuine mystery. If readers can kindly suggest a reason for going to Wokingham, they have five days in which to do it.