WHAT an unfortunate juxtaposition of signs - or is it perhaps a timely reminder for those staggering out of the Kendal Town Hall beer festival that there is a by-law preventing drinking in the street in the town centre.

Interestingly the similar sign down at Barrow depicts a dimpled, workmanlike beer glass more typical of an industrial town than Kendal's somewhat agricultural mug.

Perhaps the trend to produce signs reflecting an area's standing will continue as more and more communities get no drinking in the street by-laws and we shall see a champagne glass on the Grasmere sign, a wine glass for slightly less pretentious Windermere, a sherry glass for genteel Kirkby Lonsdale, a medicine bottle for Grange, a bucket for Burneside and a horse trough for Shap.

A SUGAR jar in the Gazette tea room bears the label 'Sport and Arts' which I always considered to be a most unholy alliance until a few months ago when I transferred from news reporting to the much more pleasant realm of sport.

Now I realise that I was quite wrong, as there are distinct similarities between the two fields, particularly in the task of reviewing an amateur dramatics performance and reporting on a football match.

In both cases the action is usually spread somewhat sparsely over a couple of acts, with enough time between the two for an interval drink to bolster yourself against whatever horrors the second half may bring.

Before both events you get a programme, often stuffed full of wildly exaggerated claims about the performers' capabilities and on top of that both directors and managers are equally good at talking up their team's prospects in pre-match/play interviews.

When the curtain goes up you are never sure if the cast in the programme will be the same as the team which actually appears under the floodlights.

Within minutes of the kick-off it becomes easy to separate the prima donnas from the honestly toiling supporting cast and to spot the copious amount of ham acting.

There is also the same touching sincerity between the grins and friendly handshakes of football substitutions as those exchanged by am-dram luvvies who have missed out in casting.

There is even more common ground between theatre and football in that an enjoyable first half does not necessarily result in the second act being a winner.

For the reporter/critic there is also a similar feeling of being remote whether sitting in a football grandstand or in the middle of a theatre audience.

That is because almost all of those around are enthusiasts, relatives or close friends of the cast/team, who can do nothing wrong in their eyes - it is just bad luck, never ineptitude, when the whole show comes off the rails.

The problem begins when you write the performance up and dare to name those who were less than perfect, for however much backbiting and petty rivalries there might be in the dressing rooms, an essential truth of both stage and pitch is - kick one and they all limp.

GAZETTE cartoonist Colin Shelbourn was a bit taken aback when he received an e-mail from China asking him to supply 12 industrial size tractors.

A few days later a South African firm asked him for a consignment of machine replacement parts.

A bit of a search on the Internet provided him with the answer when he turned up a Nebraskan-based agricultural machinery firm with the address of shelbourne.com, several thousand miles away in the real world, but a rather closer neighbour of his own web address of info @shelbourn.com.

He forwarded the e-mails to the company with a note suggesting that they might do the same if they get any e-mails requesting cartoons.

Shelbourne.com replied saying certainly, but did he know anything about shelbourn.co.uk, as they kept getting bills meant for them?

Other than being able to confirm that there is a firm of that name, Colin could not help them.

I hope that sometime soon someone will get a grip on all these dotty electronic addresses and sort the system out.