The dog doesn't have its day

12:24pm Tuesday 13th May 2008

MIKE Sarne didn't much look like a pop singer, even back in the still-startled spring of 1962.

His only big hit wasn't the most likely No. 1 of the swinging 60s, either.

It was called Come Outside, sung with a chirpy Cockney kid called Wendy Richard, and knocked Elvis - Good Luck Charm no longer - off the top of the charts. It was also the title of the first LP I ever bought.

They were the last days of innocence, the first stirrings of suspicion - Sarne of the times, as it were. All the poor guy wanted was "a bit of slap and tickle" and even then the lass didn't seem keen.

"Come outside."

"Get lorst."

"Oh come outside."

"What for?"

"There's a lovely moon out there."

Wendy Richard became famous in EastEnders and in Are You Being Served?, shortly after the invention of the double entendre.

What many people may not know is that, accent notwithstanding, she was born in 1942 in the Corporation Hotel in Middlesbrough.

Just four years after trying to talk Wendy Richard into the moonlight, Sarne was co-starring with Brigitte Bardot in the film Two Weeks In September.

He presented Junior Criss-Cross Quiz, became a fairly successful film director, pitched up a couple of Christmases back in Cinderella at Consett Empire.

I'd meant to fix an interview, never got round to it. Did he find a reason to sing Come Outside, and would anyone else have remembered if he had?

They played it on the music machine at The Dog, near Heighington. It stirred memories of the Boy Scouts' dance in Shildon, of dashing white sergeants, of slap if not of tickle.

Those are outside interests, anyway.

The Dog has long sat alongside the A68 between Darlington and West Auckland.

Once it was next to a blacksmith's shop, a condition of the pub's tenancy that the landlord could both pull a pint and shoe a horse.

Though the location seems enviable, things may not be said to have been hammer and tongs of late. It closed before Christmas, reopened at Easter.

A notice on the way in advises that it's the new people's first pub, that we're all human and that we all make mistakes.

Too true we do...

Prominently displayed next to that curious caveat is a supposed customers' charter, promising among much else that drinks will be served quickly and attentively.

It's headed Vaux Brewery and asks that comments be sent to the retail division of Vaux in Sunderland. Vaux closed a decade or more ago.

Heading towards the bar, we were intercepted, ushered to a table and told that the drinks order would be taken there. Following a reminder, the drinks arrived ten minutes later. This proved, as Mr Mike Sarne may never have said, to be a quickie.

Six starters embraced garlic bread (£2.95), cheesy garlic bread (20p more), soup, prawn cocktail, pate and garlic mushrooms. The garlic bread came with a bit of salad and was horrid; The Boss thought her mushrooms fine.

The main courses arrived.

We asked for another pint. The clearly inexperienced waitress returned a few minutes later to ask if everything were all right. It might be, we said, if there were any sign of the Black Sheep.

The meal completed, still no beer, we waited another five minutes and went to the bar.

"It's just coming," they said. It had been nineteen-and-a-half minutes, a new UK all comers' record, and in a near-empty restaurant in a nearempty pub.

Though the "charter" invites comments, the landlady's apology was halfhearted, the reparation nil.

The lady of this house had had a turgid fish pie, I a couple of faggots - the Pogues didn't do much of a service to faggots, did they? - with absurdly hot par-fried chips, cauliflower and peas.

They can't even write "peas", alas, without inserting an egregious apostrophe.

Wholly in the line of duty, we ordered "toffee apple fudge cake" from a choice of just three puddings, none hot, plus ice cream. That issue may best be fudged, too. Suffice that two-thirds of it remained.

They even managed, quite spectacularly, to muck up the bill.

Goodness knows, they are to be wished well. It may well be that every Dog has its day, but this emphatically wasn't one of them. After barely an hour, we were happy once more to go outside.

FRESH every day, Newcastle's Grainger Market is already hustling and bustling at 8am. There's a place called the Cheap Tab Shop, anther called Scotch Corner - that's a butcher's - and the Original Penny Bazaar, subject to inflation. "Traditional"

breakfast at Oliver's is £3.75, including coffee and cheery service. The bacon's very good, the fried bread awful, the rest standard. That's today's market report, anyway.

TTHE last time we ate at the Moorcock in Garsdale, the then-landlord was so unhappy with the subsequent report that he threatened - well, suffice to say that "Come outside" would have been euphemistic. That was seven years ago.

Garsdale is at Wensleydale's western extreme, the surroundings stupendous, the Settle and Carlisle railway so close by that when 12 people died in a crash on Christmas Eve 1910, the bodies were kept in the pub cellar. The Moorcock has its bins emptied by Richmondshire District Council; 100 yards up the road, Lancaster City would put the tin lid on it.

Times have changed. Simon Tijou and his partner Caz Field moved from the south two-and-half years ago, creating what their website calls a "combination of old world charm and youthful flair".

It speaks the truth - the pub is warmly welcoming, family friendly, comfortably furnished and offers more board games than Hamley's toy shop in the January sales. Lovely atmosphere.

We asked about a tab. "You look trustworthy,"

said Simon genially. You can't be right all the time.

The menu included several dishes said to have been cooked "slowly" - among them game and chestnut stew, local sausage hotpot, Moorcock lamb hotpot - perhaps in keeping with the gentler pace of life up there.

The steak, ale and mushroom pie was said to come with "proper" shortcrust pastry - and fit and proper it proved.

Abundant, carefully cooked vegetables, so-so chips.

The Boss hugely enjoyed a substantial lamb hotpot with very good gravy, and also enjoyed watching a little girl of 18 months or so tottering about the place.

Coffee came in cups so large, they could have taught the bairn to swim there.

Four hand pumps included Old Faithful from Tirril's Westmoreland Brewery in Appleby - that extra 100 yards and the Moorcock would have been in old Westmoreland too - and something from the excellent Copper Dragon brewery at Skipton, which after many adventures finds itself in North Yorkshire, also. A great shooting gallery of spirit bottles climbed behind the bar.

It was a most agreeable experience. No threat at all, we paid the tab very happily.

LAST week's column on Cafe Rouge, the French-themed place in Durham, said it was next to the "bustling, busking Prebends Bridge." It's not, it's next to the bustling, busking Framwellgate Bridge - as Ellen Carlin, Harold Heslop and others point out. It's not even the first time that I've failed properly to cross the city's bridges. As probably they say on the left bank, damn.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's yellow and flickers.

A banana with a loose connection.

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