THERE was a competition, apparently, to rename the restaurant at the Eden Arms Hotel in Rushyford. "Bet you £5m," we offered as the car squelched up the A167, "that the new name has one word and ends in an 's'." She wouldn't be on.

Hitherto, the restaurant had been dedicated to Lord Eldon, master thereabouts of much that he once surveyed.

Eldon water polo team was among Britain's best, Eldon Albion FC toiled triumphantly, Eldon bricks if laid end to end would probably have stretched several times around the equator and with a few left for a new conservatory.

Now you can buy a house in Eldon village for £3,000, probably less, and - mighty, fallen - there's not even a Lord Eldon restaurant. It has re-emerged as Seasons, told you so, and a more damn fool, anodyne sort of a name it is barely possible to imagine. Save that it's the rainy season, of course.

It is doubtless for such curmudgeonly comments that the column has itself earned a bit of a bad name of late and why, half way through dinner, the atmosphere seemed to change.

"Something's going on. There are muttered telephone conversations. You've been clocked," said The Boss.

Confirmation arrived with the waiter, a likeable and previously entirely unaffected young man, who suddenly was saying "Sir" with every other word, like roll call at Timothy Hackworth Junior Mixed.

A sir feat surfeit, it is possible to suppose.

The Eden Arms remains a Swallow Hotel, no longer part of the Vaux Group (RIP) but of Whitbread. Whoever the owner, whatever the incarnation, it never seemed to change much, though there's a new carpet in the ladies.

The bar had Boddington's bland bitter and on the television Burton Albion v Oldham Athletic; the restaurant - no smoking, no music, and no complaints on either of those scores - had three or four steps down and no ramped access.

A waitress fell up them. "My grandmother always said that it was unlucky to fall up the stairs," said The Boss.

"It's not bad luck, it's stupidity," said the waiter, to whom the heart warmed by the minute. It was before he was re-cast as Son of Uriah Heep, of course.

As always on match nights, we had also inquired about the Arsenal score. The waiter topped it up willingly, Roma 1 Gunners 3, as if from a bottle of good Burgundy.

Diners appeared mainly also to be hotel guests, selling electric drills and things and discussing the tools of their trade, though there was a couple from Croft who'd won dinner for two in the village hall raffle and thought it all very passable.

Though it's a bit hard to know what to do with the dining room - big, impersonal, the sort of place that makes you want to catch the next train home - the food was a pleasant surprise.

Cream of asparagus soup was hot and tasty. Since the menu promised that the chefs made fresh soup every day, they were doubtless also responsible for the semi-solid lumps at the bottom.

The Boss began with smoked salmon with a new potato and red onion compote - "excellent," she said - and was little less impressed by the mushroom and asparagus casserole on top of a crisp risotto cake (£9.95) nor with the carefully cooked vegetables.

The honey glazed chicken breast with mushroom and bacon pasta was perhaps a little overpriced at £10.95 but was full of flavour and eaten, every morsel.

The menu, it might be added, also featured our new friend the escolar - a fishy fink first caught a few weeks back at the Baydale Beck in Darlington. This was supreme of escolar, no less, and with a prawn and tarragon butter sauce. The influence, it is said, is Mediterranean.

We finished with toffee and banana sponge with a butterscotch sauce - fresh and moist, a proper English pudding.

Afterwards we were invited to sign the bill - "just to say you've got it" - though presumably a ploy to confirm the surreptitious sighting. Correspondents who long have struggled to decipher the column's handwriting will know that the ruse was doomed to failure.

It was entirely enjoyable, for all the unnecessary attention. One Swallow may not make a summer, but on a nasty November night it was perfectly OK. Yes, sir.

THOUGH vigorous as ever, Edward Boynton - long time owner with his brother Raymond of the Good Pub Guide recommended Nags Head at Pickhill - is suddenly feeling his age.

He featured last week in the "20 years ago" column in the Darlington and Stockton Times.

The Nags, off the A1 near Thirsk, had in 1982 raised substantial amounts for charity - often with daft bets like encouraging customers to crawl through an unglazed door panel, measuring just 9ins by 11ins.

"It made me feel ancient," says Edward though, at 50, he plans to make his race riding debut over hurdles at Wetherby in February.

The unglazed internal door panel remains - "and," says the beat-the-scales landlord, "I can still squeeze myself through it."

HEADED "Victim of our own success", a letter also arrives from John Lowes at Darlington area Age Concern. We wrote a couple of months back of the Drop In Restaurant in Beaumont Street, thriving then and positively stowed out now.

They need more volunteers, especially on the breakfast rush from 9am - they're on (01325) 326832 and may have the plug despite the absence of a stamp. Cause for Concern, the company is 95p poorer as a result.

FOR reasons too complicated to recite, last week's column had cause to mention the Brazilian footballer Tostao - a star of the 1970 World Cup winning team - and the detached retina operation he underwent just days before the final.

It reminded Chris Willsden in Darlington of one of Malcolm Allison's choicer remarks, on the ITV panel on the day of the 1970 final.

"Tostao," said Big Mal, "is the best one eyed striker since Moshe Dayan."

...and finally the bairns, appropriately for the time of the year, wondered if we knew why Santa's little helper was depressed.

Because he had low elf-esteem.