Nothing to get steamed up about?

MEMORABLY, we have spent a week on the wondrous Hebridean island of Mull, and with a further trip across the water to Iona – the latter given to the nation by the Fraser who also gave us Binns.

Iona was colonised by the 6th Century saint Columba, appropriately accompanied by 12 disciples. The hair-shirt attraction was that they could no longer see their beloved Ireland, Columba’s legendary condition that the small island would be home to neither cows nor women.

Cows were noisy beggars, he supposed, a condemnation which latterly would have embraced American tourists. Where cows were, women were. Women, thought Columba, were trouble.

These days Iona’s spiritual tranquillity attracts men and women from all over the world. We still didn’t see any cows.

ACROSS on the mainland, the Oban Times did its best to make us feel at home. Not only was there a photograph of a chap reading his favourite Scottish weekly in front of the Mallard, Darlington’s brick train – which looked very impressive – but a report of an 18-year-old hauled before Oban sheriff’s court charged with trespassing with intent to steal.

Despite the sheriff’s doubts, his solicitor successfully urged a noncustodial sentence. To escape both peer pressure and the hard drinking culture, his client – for whom kindness compels anonymity – had moved south to Darlington.

Darlington? The town said to have more licensed premises per head than any other in the land? The young man may only be wished good luck.

BRICKS without straw, as the biblical Israelites were compelled, the subject of the Mallard – still the world speed record holder for steam traction – cropped up in Eleven Minutes Late, more holiday reading.

The title’s purloined from Reggie Perrin, the book a choleric but hugely entertaining overview of Britain’s railway history and recent performance.

The author is Guardian journalist Matthew Engel, described on the dust jacket as “part John Betjeman, part Victor Meldrew”.

Engel, at any rate – and the rate, it will be recalled, was a pretty nifty 126mph – is dismissive of Mallard’s achievement. Too many had been paddling like mad beneath the water.

It was a publicity stunt, he insists, the top speed was maintained for just one second, it was going downhill and the engine never even reached Kings Cross, because the big end went before Peterborough.

The conclusion’s not so much bricks, as clemmies. “Mallard could have gone much faster, just as successfully, over a cliff.”

MALLARD was a streamlined A4 Pacific, number 60022.

The design, like many more, was the work of the venerated Sir Nigel Gresley, the LNER’s chief mechanical engineer.

“One of the great engineers of the golden afternoon of steam traction,”

says the Gresley Society.

A year ago, following a letter in The Times, we drew attention to Sir Nigel’s “sadly neglected” grave in the closed cemetery at Netherseal, in Derbyshire – “a really poor grave for such an eminent gentleman,” agreed Gresley Society secretary Chris Nettleton from Eaglescliffe, near Stockton.

It’s wholly coincidental that David Burniston now advises that the grave to Sir Nigel and Lady Gresley has been restored, the rededication on July 24 to be attended by Tim Godfrey, their eldest grandson.

The column has been invited. Unless Sir Nigel turns there, Mr Engel probably hasn’t.

AS usual returning a clipping whence it came, a note from the ever-faithful Janet Murrell in Durham also awaits our return.

This one concerns North Yorkshire Council’s printed reaction to an accident outside a school in Richmond: “While it’s not a statuary obligation to have a 20mph speed limit….” Janet provides the punchline, too. “So glad it’s not written in stone.”

SINCE we’d been contemplating the word “furkle” – as used by the late Mr Ian Nelson to describe his dominoes strategy at Lune Street club in Saltburn – Blaster Bates quietly exploded into the column two weeks ago.

Blaster, we said, used to talk of furkling; Jason Adlard confirms it.

“I’m a fan,” he admits. “My grandmother used to listen to him in the evening and when I stayed with them, I’d sneak down to the bottom step and listen round the door, hoping I wouldn’t be caught.”

Old Blaster used it in the sense of rummaging about – “I’ll have a furkle in my bag and see what I can find” – a use attested by the online Urban Dictionary.

Curiously, there’s no reference whatever to dominoes, or to Lune Street workmen’s club.

THE column two weeks ago also noted the Birthday Honours List MBE awarded to Mr Xenophon Kelsey, a composer, musician and teacher from Ripon.

Though that X stood not for requested anonymity, we had been unable to contact him.

Mr Kelsey, known usually as Xen – “People think it begins with a Z, and that I’m a Buddhist” – has since been in touch.

He was christened Arthur John Xenophon Kelsey, known until the sixth form as John – “only my dentist ever called me Arthur” – when a juggle of Johns compelled clarification.

Xen stuck. “I find it quite useful to have a catchy name. There are a lot more Johns than there are Xens,”

he says.

His mother was half-Greek. The family, he says, can trace its ancestry back to the original Xenophon, a mercenary soldier and writer in ancient Greece. “I suppose he had qualities of leadership and determination.

I think he was quite a wise guy,”

says the newly honoured Mr Kelsey.

Xen as now? “That,” he adds sagely, “is really not for me to say.”

…and finally back to Mull where a bottle of the local ale – Terror of Tobermory – costs £3.90 but has a tale to tell, nonetheless.

Tobermory’s the island capital, model for the children’s television series Balamory and cleaned up, long ago, by one of the Wombles. Its Terror, at least in the Second World War, was vice-admiral Sir Gilbert Stephenson.

Stephenson, by then in his 60s and still wearing wing collars, had been put in charge of intensive courses to teach crews of frigates, corvettes and the like the basics of anti-submarine warfare. His methods were brisk, his manner disciplinarian, his success rate remarkable.

Most famously, it’s said, the Terror once threw his gold-braided cap onto the deck in front of a young quartermaster, told him that it was a small unexploded bomb dropped by the enemy and demanded to know what he was going to do about it.

The lad at once kicked the cap into the sea, greeted not by the vice-admiral’s rage but with his commendation.

Then, however, Stephenson pointed towards the cap, bobbing on the waves.

“It’s a man overboard, what are you going to do about that?” he demanded.

The unfortunate quartermaster quickly followed the cap over the side.