SUCH has been these columns’ watchword for almost a quarter of a century, though “many days”

may more usually become seven. Translated, it means that one thing leads to another – and we have many friends in knead.

In Middleton-in-Teesdale Co-op, at any rate, David Kelly asked for bread buns and ended up with a packet of four scufflers, from the Rothbury Home Bakery.

As opposed to scuffer, one of countless slang terms for a policeman – “origin obscure” – the vast Oxford English Dictionary notes only that a scuffler may be “one who scuffles”

or, less commonly, an agricultural tool used for scarifying.

Assiduously, however, David has also discovered scufflers on the menu at the Snow Hall Golf Club, near York, sausage scuffler £2.10, bacon scuffler £2.30, sausage and bacon scuffler £2.60.

It’s one of an estimated 200 different types of bread – from bap to bloomer, panini to pumpernickel – available in Britain.

David’s impressed, the column less so. Whatever happened to the simpler days of cut and uncut, and to bread with nowt tekken out?

SOMETIMES it’s not so much a case of casting your bread upon the water as leaving a half a loaf floating there. A line in last week’s column on North-East place names supposed that Shildon was unique and was being somewhat disingenuous.

As Lesley Hodgson and Paul Dobson point out, and as we knew fine well, Shildon isn’t even unique to the North-East. There’s another settlement of that name a mile uphill from Blanchland, just west of Pennypie Fell on the Durham/Northumberland border.

“We’ve walked through there many a time,” says Lesley and the column stepped that way in August 2004. The other Shildon, we’d noted, was a place of great charm, considerable beauty and just three houses.

Like big brother, it had a County Durham postal address.

The chief difference between the two may have been that the more northerly Shildon doesn’t possess by far the greatest football team the world has ever seen. Last Friday, a lovely catkins-coming lunchtime, we dandered up there again.

It was lead mining territory, living conditions said to be so dreadful that the 18th Century historian William Hutchinson reckoned the Blanchland and Shildon area “like the realms of mortification”. The distress and ragged appearance of the village was most deplorable, he added.

Shildon Burn still burbles, Shildon Wood remains trulgy, the remains of the historic old engine house still stand. Much has changed, nonetheless: Shildon, whichever Shildon, is a place of beauty now.

John Heslop in Durham, however, is happy to retain the status quo.

He’s checked the internet site Google Maps World Gazetteer and discovered that while there are 14 Sheldons, the world’s only big enough to accommodate one Shildon.

They don’t mean a titchy little place in Northumberland, either.

JOHN Heslop also joins the selection committee – more halftime pies than bread on the water – in last week’s attempt to pick a football team from North- East place names. You know – Percy Main, Billy Row and the like.

By splitting names – not strictly within the laws of the game, but you know what referees are like these days – John blithely adds the likes of Stan Hope, Giles Gate, Edmund Byers, Allen Dale and Roddy Moor.

Other possibles include Morton Tinmouth – thought previously to be a breed of Scottish football bother boy – Witton Gilbert and the aurally challenged Deaf Hill.

He’s also named a ladies’ side which includes Stella, Daisy Hill and Victoria Garesfield – where on earth is Victoria Garesfield? – and a youth team with the likes of Black Boy, Little Thorpe and Low Newton.

Redmarshall might be the appointed ref.

For us, it had begun on a long car journey. John doesn’t even have that excuse. “I think how sad I must be.

I’m just waiting for the tumble drier to finish.”

CHRIS Orton bit, too. For some reason, he says, we appear to have omitted some of the region’s best players – what of Kirk Merrington, Dalton Piercey, the hardy centre back Thorpe Thewles or the upper class goalkeeper Stanwick St John?

And what, he continues, of the skilful French midfielder Preston- le-Skerne?

Chris, from Ferryhill, also nominates Davy Lamp and is challenged on the grounds that it’s merely the name of a pub, east of Durham, in Kelloe. He at once concedes.

“Forget him, he was never much good, anyway.”

DAVY Munday, on the other hand, is a Darlington lad long exiled to Dunfermline who – in time for last Sunday – kindly sent a new book called The Broons’ Burns Night, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the great poet’s birth. It was simply labelled “Something for the weekend”

and in the absence of anything more than a haggis sandwich, it was perfect. Lang may your lum reek, Davy.

NOT quite the same thing, but Tom Dobbin in Durham wonders how Tursdale – a former mining village now just off the A1 near the Bowburn interchange – came to be known as Hoggersgate.

Tom was born there, School Street, 80 years ago. “All the old lads knew it as Hoggersgate, nothing else, but how it got it I don’t know.”

He also recalls his once-weekly bath and how, when he was 14, Tursdale finally got electricity – though he still did his homework by oil lamp.

“A 25 watt bulb was considered too bright,” he says. “A 40 watt was just showing off.”

NOTHING has been more liberally scattered than the apostrophe, usually in the wrong places. Back from watching the blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire, Robin Perrie reports a question on the Alexander Dumas novel The Three Musketeers.

On the screen in front of the question master it read “Dumas’ novel”.

As Robin pondered whether it was right, the camera panned over to the contestant’s screen. It said “Dumas’s novel”.

He’s unimpressed. “The film might land a bucketful of Oscars, but someone in continuity can’t even decide where to put his apostrophes.”

…and finally, a clergyman of our happy acquaintance offers the joke about an Amish farmer – the Amish are an American group who live in a more biblical age – who takes his family on a first visit to a shopping mall.

He and his son are particularly puzzled by the lift, something they’ve never seen before.

As they stand staring at it, an elderly lady approaches on her motorised scooter, presses a button and the doors open to reveal a small room, into which she drives, and the doors close behind her.

Father and son watch the numbers light up one after the other – ascending, stopping and then coming down again. The doors open and a beautiful, buxom blonde steps out.

“Son,” says the excited farmer, “go get your mom.”

Several slices short of a picnic, more bread upon the waters next week.