PERHAPS the only visitor with a copy of the Good Beer Guide in his briefcase, I spent the weekend at the Methodist Conference in sunny Southport.

Reference to it has already been made in yesterday’s Backtrack column, will continue in Saturday’s Eating Owt and – centrally, soberly – in At Your Service the same day.

Some might simply suppose that it is impossible to have too much of a Good thing, others that for the price of a double room at the Plaza Ramada it is necessary to prove multifaceted.

With breakfast, it’s £210. With the Sunday Times a few bob more; the chap who fixed the air conditioning seemed all-inclusive. Wasn’t it the “certain lawyer” in St Luke’s gospel who sought to justify himself? Probably even he didn’t have to have someone sign his expenses in the middle of a squeeze.

The room was said to have views over the promenade, which was sensible.

Those familiar with Southport will know that it is necessary to have high-resolution binoculars and eyes like a coal house rat in order to see the sea. Neither applies here.

THUS it was that the lady of the house, blessedly also in attendance, was first to spot the sign outside the Lakeside Inn.

“Smallest pub in Britain,” it said, and – parvo in multum, as the Romans used to say – told a little whopper.

The Lakeside is wholly pleasant, perfectly friendly. Whatever they say about good stuff in little bundles, however, Britain’s smallest pub is almost certainly the Rat Race on Hartlepool railway station – less than half the size of its minimalist rival.

Too tiny even for a bar, it was opened in 2009 by Peter Morgan, a former Newcastle Building Society IT bod who lives in one or other of the Trimdons and is a life member of the Campaign for Real Ale. The John North column in December that year thought it about the size of a domestic garage and “utterly wonderful”, the 2011 Good Beer Guide believes it “perfect”.

“That it is on Hartlepool railway station, one of the most singularly desolate places in the kingdom, makes its arrival yet more improbable,”

John North added.

Opening hours are limited, getting into the Rat Race almost as difficult as getting out of it.

Either way it’s no big deal, of course, but Hartlepool is seen to have precious few really positive claims to fame. The Lakeside on Southport prom may inarguably have the better location, but the Rat Race is all that they say about being small but perfectly formed.

That point clearly and historically made, the Methodist Conference may now return to its agenda.

TWO readers – Paul Dobson from Bishop Auckland and Ian Reeve from the BBC in Newcastle – draw attention to an Echo report headlined “Accomplice in sex sting walks free from court”.

One of the defendants, it was said, had been armed with an asp and a knife. “Can that really be a small, venomous European viper with an upturned snout?” asks Ian.

No, it can’t, though asked about asps a lady in the Durham constabulary press office is equally cautious.

“It’s a snake, isn’t it?” she says.

It’s also an expandable, telescopic baton used widely by officers in The Bill – and doubtless elsewhere – though perhaps not in more lawabiding places like Durham.

That those involved in sex stings appear also to be thus armed may be a matter of concern, however.

The internet also reveals that “asp” is national railways shorthand for Aspatria station in Cumbria, though this – it is to be feared – may not entirely be relevant.

LAST week’s column recalled that the Anglo-Italian family of Dennis Donnini – son of an Easington Colliery ice cream parlour owner and, posthumously, the youngest man to be awarded a Second World War VC – had been interned at Harperley PoW camp, near Wolsingham, because baselessly it was feared they might flash signals to enemy ships.

It reminded Pete Winstanley in Durham of the story of Antonio Staffieri, an Italian who’d lost a kidney in the First World War after being bayoneted while fighting alongside the Allies.

Thereafter he came to Britain, opened the Bridge End Café in Chester-le-Street and took British citizenship in protest against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

“My father was a religious man, who never touched alcohol, but the night he was naturalised he went out to have a drink, he was so happy,” his son once recalled.

MI5 and Special Branch files declassified in 2004 revealed, however incredibly, that he had been placed on a restricted list “because of his boastful disposition, resemblance to Mussolini and is not popular with the public”.

Back then, as might reasonably be supposed, not a lot of Italian natives were.

These days, football teams in the Durham and District Sunday League still play for the Staffieri Cup.

Someone may know if there’s a connection.

WEEKS of references to Anglo-Italian ice cream men, and the large correspondence subsequently produced, stem from the death of former Bishop Auckland café owner Eddie Rossi, reported here on May 18. (There’s a Rossi’s café in Southport, incidentally: £2.50 for a cornet, probably not refundable on expenses and not in the same league as Bishop.) Eddie was lovely, Rossi’s affectionately remembered by generations of south Durham folk.

For those unable to picture it, Ian Ingram forwards images of what became known as Rossi’s Corner – probably depicting the swinging Sixties. One’s by Eric Thompson, with whom I was at school, the other by Gary Miller.

Ian helps run the family removals business in Bishop, both paintings hang on his office wall. “You can see I live in the past,” he says. “I have a picture of George Reynolds up there, as well.”

RETURNED from a Cornish holiday a couple of weeks ago, we chronicled some of the Duchy’s most resonant names – like Mousehole, Readymoney and Buckland- tout-Saints. It struck a chord with Anne Gibbon in Darlington who spent part of her childhood in nearby East Allington – East Allington- sans-Electricity, she says. Her brother in Essex introduced her to Matching Tye, which, doubtless dapper, really does exist. The comedian Rik Mayall was a Matching Tye lad, but that much may be obvious already.

CHIEFLY for his help with mathematical problems,.

Robert Bacon – an old school friend – has several times featured hereabouts.

Shildon lad originally, Robert’s a retired ICI chemical engineer on Teesside and has now forwarded an animated clip of a Dilbert strip cartoon.

Called Dilbert: the Knack, it demonstrates, says Robert, “the low esteem in which engineers, despite their brilliance, are held by the general public”.

The thought’s echoed by Alan Sugar in the latest Apprentice series: “I’ve never seen an engineer make a success of business,” he says – and summarily fires the guy.

… and finally, Ivor Wade in Darlington forwards the doubtless whiskery joke about the Yorkshireman who takes his pet to the vet – “aa need to talk to thee about me cat.”

“Is it a tom?” asks the vet.

“Nay, lad,” says the other feller, “aa’ve browt it with us in this basket.”

Methodism in the madness, the column returns next week.