Keeping up with the Smiths

Vegetable soup is 50p or 75p - mug, cup or bowl - bangers and mash £1.80, which for the Covered Market caff is on the pricey side. Most other hot meals are cheaper still.

Elderly couples sit around as if waiting for corporation transport, or the Co-op men, or both. None speaks. It's I Didn't Know You Cared meets Last of the Summer Wine, and poor Compo gone already.

Christine, the cheery French lady who manages the place, strives to inject a little joie de vivre. The floor is swept energetically, perhaps therapeutically.

The soup's a bit bland of hope and glory, the sausage and mash quite pleasant in an instantly gratifying sort of way. An old man in an ageing cap drums his stick to the sound of silence.

It's absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Abstinence is something else entirely.

NOR was the Valentine available, or indeed up to it, the following day. We lunched instead with the Reverend Gentleman, a last second but eminently acceptable substitute, at Hogarth's, in Darlington.

He took a glass of dry white, citing against admonition the fifth chapter of St Paul's letter to Timothy. "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and for thine often infirmities," wrote Paul, and though the advice was meant solely for poor Timothy - whose condition was well beyond two aspirins and an early night - it has served imbibing Bible belters ever since.

(The Gentleman also revealed that he has a second cousin who collects Toilet Duck bottles from around the world. Not only has he now a complete collection, but he has killed all known germs.)

Hogarth's is in Coniscliffe Road, next to Bishop's House restaurant which has the same owners. William Hogarth, parish priest of the adjoining St Augustine's church, became the first Roman Catholic bishop of Newcastle in 1850, wanted to build his new cathedral at Hexham - not Newcastle - and steadfastly refused to leave the delights of Darlington.

Known as Bishop Billy, though possibly not to his face, he wrote that "the idea of gratifying the people of Newcastle" had little value. "A bishop may go into Newcastle occasionally on great occasions, but no one should be condemned to live there."

The link between Hogarth's/Bishop's House and the Covered Market caf is that the first two have recently been bought by Pam and Charles Smith who are in the process of selling the caf and no longer own the newsagency at the other end of the building. Their son Daniel, trained at the Riverside Garden in Kensington, is now second chef back home.

In the back was a loquaciousness - it may become the favoured collective noun - of lunching ladies, up front the nice lady who fights to maintain services at the Catholic church in Middleton-in-Teesdale.

Across the cacophonic airwaves came local commercial radio, including every few minutes the ineffable oik who proclaims "I love carpets, me". It is all very well for people like Mr Jim Ruck to write to Hear All Sides complaining that the Eating Owt column should stick to its prescribed diet, but - whilst we have nothing whatever against local commercial radio between consenting adults in private - it is a most monstrous intrusion in public.

We mentioned it afterwards to Pam Smith, who wants to make Hogarth's the in-place for "people of our age". Oh, you know. The CD player was broken, she said, otherwise it might have been Dean Martin. That's amore.

Lunchtime alternatives are comparatively simple: salad bowls, imaginative sandwiches, baked potatoes, specials (all £4.50) like cheese and bacon rosti, venison sausage and garlic mash or turkey curry and rice.

Both Hogarth's and the Bishop's House now open in the evening, too - the Smiths hope soon to cover the courtyard between the two, creating a new area - much of the menu the same, but with a few bob added at the posh end.

There wasn't any soup. "It was Valentine's Day," said Pam, by way of slightly curious explanation. Instead the Reverend Gentleman - who'd brought the choir there for a Christmas treat, what's known as singing for your supper, presumably - had the pasta carbonara, which he much enjoyed. The smoked chicken Caesar salad was a well dressed success, too, the croutons a bit soggy though it's the absent lady who's the expert on matters Caesarean.

Puddings (£3.25) included lovely banana crepes and a caramel apple granny (or some juxtaposition of those three words) which was very pleasant but, as grannies tend to be, a bit on the small side.

The Gentleman then had a Scrutiny Committee to look into, and we the sick to attend. The Valentine, it is fervently to be hoped, will be back on her feet next week.

l Hogarth's, Coniscliffe Road, Darlington (01325) 382200. Open 10-am-11pm and Sunday lunch until 4pm. Two course dinner, £10.

WEAR Valley CAMRA's third beer festival was Valentine themed, too, ales with such romantic names as Stud, Village Bike, Hooker, Love Muscle and even a Sheapshearer - or something of similar sound - and a Ramsbottom, which shouldn't be taken together.

Since the venue is Bishop Auckland Town Hall, they tend to bill these things initially - Beer in the BATH - though the next one might be called the John the Baptist Festival, so greatly do they cry in the wilderness in Bishop Auckland, a true real ale desert.

There are both beer and food menus, the hot beef and onion sandwich as good value as all other grub at the town hall. Gillian Wales, the manager, sipped a half of Bitter and Twisted. It was entirely inappropriate, of course.

THENCE to the Joiners Arms at Hunwick, three miles to the north-west, where Ian and Anne Richardson marked 30 years behind the bar - February 15, 1971 was Decimalisation Day, of course - with a splendid little bash. Music by Billy J Jackson; more hot beef sandwiches, incomparably, by the landlord.

Mrs Jean Foster, also in attendance, kindly pointed out a scriptural solecism at the top of last week's column. It was the Roman centurion's servant, not his daughter, who was healed from afar. Jairus, said Jean, had the daughter.

The Joiners had marked Valentine's Day, the previous evening, with a special meal that included such supposed aphrodisiacs as lobster and oysters. Ian had four oysters and is unconvinced. "Only two of the buggers worked.".

Incorrigibly maintaining the theme, the bairns wondered if we knew what's big and grey and sings Cole Porter love songs.

Elephants Gerald.

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