PERHAPS the greatest of the little perquisites of being chairman of the league - you know, the Arngrove Northern League - is that you get both a half-time cup of tea beneath the stand and the invigorating debate which accompanies it.

Thus at Billingham Synthonia last Wednesday evening, thermometer hovering - havering? - around zero but heated discussion, nonetheless.

What, it was wondered over the chocolate digestives, was the origin of the phrase "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey".

Received wisdom is that the term is nineteenth century nautical. A brass monkey, it's said, was the triangular device in which cannon balls were stored on board ship. When it contracted - "brass has a high coefficient," the more scientific Synners explained - the ammo flew all over the place.

Nigel Rees repeats the theory in A Word In Your Ear but, having set it up, aims at it a fusillade of uncertainty. Peter Chadlington, author of The Real McCoy, believes the origin may lie with the three wise monkeys of familiar symbolism - "an image of something solid and inert that could only be affected by extremes".

Gadfly still leans towards the seafarers. This week's ball's rolling, anyway.

WHOLESALE coincidence, A Load of Old Balls arrives. The little book is part of an English Heritage series called Played in Britain, which celebrates our sporting culture.

It's exactly what it says, everything from snowballs to skittles, from the balls used in the FA Cup draw to the beach balls famously featured on the cover of the naturist magazine Health and Efficiency. Enid Blyton, adds author Simon Inglis, liked a game of tennis in the nude. Do Noddy and Big Ears know this?

There's a giant push ball, featured in Scarborough Museum, multi-coloured carpet bowls still at the Castle Museum in York. There are marbles, ping-pong balls, black balls and every other sort imaginable. What goes around comes around, where would we have been without them?

AMONG the books already on these cheek-by-jowl shelves is a volume called Goldenballs and the Iron Lady, sub-titled A Little Book of Nicknames.

The Iron Lady is Margaret Thatcher, of course. Posh Spice revealed on the Parkinson Show in 2001 that Goldenballs is her pet name for the old feller. Before bouncing to any other sphere, therefore, readers are invited to name the following ten familiar people from their nicknames. Golden Bear, Papa Doc, The Flying Dutchwoman, The Grocer, Mogadon Man, The Manassa Mauler, Sly, Satchmo, The Power and the Welsh Windbag. Answers at the foot of the column.

THE word "fulsome" has been employed 123 times in the past decade in The Northern Echo and the Darlington and Stockton Times, with whom we share a database. In every case, it has been used incorrectly.

Usually, of course, well meaning folk are said to be fulsome in their praise. Sportsmen positively overflow with fulsomeness; on one occasion we supposed that Gordon Brown was more fulsome than Tony Blair. (This is a matter of opinion.)

Apologies are said to be fulsome, too, perhaps with unwitting accuracy. Mr William Hague, for example, was said a few years ago to be fulsome in his repentance after an unwise joke about the Spice Girls.

It has also crept into Hear All Sides, into the Tuesday Poem, a concert critique ("a fulsome rendition of Elgar's Serenade For Strings") and even into a restaurant review.

Our friends at the Rose and Crown in Romaldkirk were said to serve fulsome cream of pheasant soup. Whatever their game, they shouldn't have been too happy about it.

Our parliamentary correspondent wrote: "Fridays (at Westminster) are normally as sleepy as a hereditary peer after a fulsome dinner" and may have been nearer the mark than he supposed.

These columns were much the worst offender until October 2000, when after two references in ten days - one of them to a fulsome programme at Newcastle's Roman Catholic cathedral - we realised the true meaning and eschewed the f-word for ever.

Chambers defines it as "cloying or causing surfeit; nauseous, offensive, rank or disgustingly fawning". The New Bloomsbury offers "effusive or fawning to the point of being offensive". Other dictionaries concur, as does the author Philip Gooden in Who's Whose. "Fulsome", he insists, is in no way a synonym for "heartfelt".

There was a piece about it in Monday's Guardian, they as guilty as the rest of us. Is this the most wrongly used word in the English language?

THE James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough is so huge that the taxi fare from the railway station can differ by up to £1 between north and south entrances.

I've become accustomed to the journey, my dear old Shildon friend Mike Armitage having been a patient for five months until last week's transfer back to Darlington Memorial.

Though north and south may never meet, what they have in common - and with the main entrance at the Memorial - is that smokers, often in wheelchairs, congregate, coffin nailed, around the doors. Some may be desperately ill, others just desperate. It's a funny old front page for a hospital.

The Telegraph's letters columns spluttered about such things last week, someone describing the scene outside hospitals as "Hogarthian" - after the eighteenth century satirist, cartoonist and engraver William Hogarth, who depicted The Rake's Progress (and the Harlot's, too).

Readers may decide for themselves how Hogarthian it is to see folk shortening their lives outside a hospital. It's hardly progress, though, is it.

SEVERAL readers offer a top-up to the debate in recent columns about the most bibulous place in the region. Middleton Tyas, it may be recalled, was a surprise contender.

Martin Birtle proposes Whitby, which once had 46 pubs for 10,000 people and doesn't exactly go dry today. Bob Harbron sends a long list of licensed premises in Hartlepool and West Hartlepool in 1894, the most improbable the Vale of Avoca in Robinson Street. Where was Avoca, then?

The new and perhaps unsurprising leader, however, is the area of Middlesbrough dockland between the railway and the river still known as Over the Border.

Harry Watson in Darlington sends an extraordinary map of the area's 18 streets in 1887-88, showing no fewer than 68 pubs and beer houses. There were other attractions, too, and bordering on the unmentionable.

Commercial Street had nine - Albion, Baltic, Commercial, Earl of Zetland, Robin Hood, Royal Victoria, Three Tuns, Turf Hotel and Golden Anchor - while Stockton Street's eight included the George, the Liberal and the Whitby.

Other ports of call, nautical but not necessarily very nice, may have been the Steam Packet, Sailors' Return, Mariners' Tavern, Ship Launch, Hope and Anchor and Captain Cook.

Memory suggests that just three remain - and they say we have a drink problem today.

TIME and space forbids a return to the song of Aiken Drum, about which a number of other readers have been helpful. More next week: if not the load of old whatnot, then cannon fodder, anyway.

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