THESE are not green fingers, especially not since the unfortunate business of the severed extension lead. It was 1986, and the fingers after that turned sooty black.

Quite a few people inadvertently cut the lawn mower cable; rather fewer pick up the live end to see what on earth's the matter. We are nonetheless most grateful to former Shildon lad John Chandler, now training for the Church of England ministry, for the gift of a packet of Darlingtonia Californica, known to gardeners as the deadly cobra lily.

Blooming fearful, the column had mentioned Darlingtonia Californica on June 7, after the little blighter featured on Gardeners' World. It eats insects, lures them to a particularly sticky end, isn't too particular about its manners. The seed packet takes up the grisly story:

"Each raised leaf of the cobra lily forms a snake-like body topped with a puffed-out hood and forked tongue leading into its open mouth. Growing as a clump in a pot, they resemble a pit of cobras rising up to threaten you, and in their own way are every bit as deadly."

Until now, they had nothing to do with Darlington, the name coming from William Darlington, an American botanist.

Perhaps it is because they best thrive on peat bogs 5,000ft up that, under "Cultivation", it's the box marked "Challenge" which is ticked. That this office is home only to Gadflies would hardly make Darlingtonia feel like getting its feet under the table, either.

Californica dreaming, it will therefore be planted where the lady of the house is not only cultivating an olive tree in the North-East of England - with some signs of success - but who rose 27 years ago to the challenge of marrying me.

Fly on the wall, more reports later.

STILL straddling the Pond, we learn from Darlington Scrabble Club secretary Geoff Howe that in Rappahannock County, Virginia, there's a small town called Scrabble - letters from America, though it appears not to have a post office.

There's also a Scrabbletown in Anne Arundel County, Maryland - perhaps named, Geoff muses, after the world famous game.

Challenged to propose any other places named after a game - or vice-versa - the Planning Meeting fell uncommonly silent. Mr Tim Stahl's suggestion of Criccieth was regarded as facetious; rugby was properly named after a school.

Playing up, as always, readers may have more success - and Darlington Scrabble Club meets in the town hall every Tuesday at 6.30pm.

MR Briggs, also at the Planning Meeting, fell to pondering the Premiership footballers whose surnames would score most points at Scrabble.

West Brom goalkeeper Tomasz Kuszczak would rack up 36, joint top with Eric Djemba-Djemba of Aston Villa.

Former Chelsea defender Jakob Kjeldbjerg rates 31 and Spurs man Goran Bunjevcovic 30. Muzzy Izzet's not bad, either.

Since a Scrabble's hand has a maximum of one z, however, and since a player can have only seven letters at a time, Southampton's hitherto unsung midfielder Nigel Quashie - one goal in 32 appearances last season - may be football's highest scorer of all.

HoW might Bartholomew Bandy have fared in such testing circumstances? A disillusioned former school teacher, he was the "World spelling champion" whose story appeared in The Rover and Wizard for 14 issues in 1968.

There he is alongside such comic book classroom heroes as Thick Ear Donovan, who was both sheriff and schoolmaster of Moose Springs, in north-west Canada and whose nickname perhaps needs little explanation.

Spotted by boxing booth promoter Tich Kelly and billed as the Human Dictionary, Bandy could spell every word put to him - even inflorescence.

It is therefore a little unfortunate that the website where we stumbled upon him describes him as "The Marval of the Age" and Tich Kelly as "a cleaver little fellow".

Sharp as an axe, no doubt.

THE use of the phrase "grisly story" just now was both appropriate and deliberate. When last we let loose the g-word, we spelt it "grizzly" and were properly rebuked. Grizzly applies chiefly to bears; it simply means grey.

IT'S chiefly because of such horrible reminders that we feel it prudent to decline a suggestion from Clive Sledger in Aldbrough St John, near Richmond.

From a book called "Return of Heroic Failures" by Stephen Pile, Clive sends a paragraph headed "The least successful newspaper competition" - run in 1986 by the "distinguished British journalist" Henry Porter.

(While no doubt distinguished, Mr Porter is also exceedingly large, a former prop forward for Blackheath or someone. I once almost got into a fight with him at a Fleet Street leaving do, which wouldn't have been very heroic at all.)

At any rate, he inserted five deliberate grammatical errors into his Sunday Times column and promised a bottle of champagne to the first reader correctly to identify them. "Letters poured in by the sack load," recalls Pile. "The next week Mr Porter announced that readers had found none of the five mistakes. They had, however, located a further 23 of which he had been wholly unaware."

RETURN of Heroic Failures was a follow-up to the Book of Heroic Failures, said to be the official handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The first volume recorded that the worst homing pigeon had been released in Pembrokeshire in June 1953, expected to reach its loft later that day. It finally arrived 11 years later - posted, quite dead, from Brazil.

....and finally, the chance of a little success. Since last week's column touched upon stage names - like Matt Vesper and Vane Tempest, better known to their mates in Victorian Shildon as Matthew and Jack Denham - readers are invited to suggest the names by which the following are better known. Answers at the foot of the column.

Henry McCarty, Martha Jane Burke, the Rev C L Dodgson, Iosif V Dzhugashvili, Priscilla White, Michael Dumble-Smith, David Kaminsky, Cherilyn Sarkisian, Frederick Austerlitz, Leslie Sebastian Charles.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2004