Travelling Heifer needs direction

AT Richmond Golf Club, where I addressed the annual dinner of the local Conservative Association - the secret's to tell John Prescott jokes - they do a terrific caramel apple granny. Old, old story, perhaps, but "granny" seems to have hobbled from nowhere onto every menu in town.

The dictionaries don't even offer a taster. The Oxford includes granny bonds and granny bonnets, granny specs and even granny battering, but nothing which suggests just desserts.

Doubtless it's one of these terms that's meant to sound traditional and cosy and as-your-mother-used-to-make it. We've no wish, in any case, to tie etymological granny knots. Not today, anyway.

Rather we mention the Richmond occasion because there are so many dinners in the run-up to Christmas that there's barely time to eat, or to Eat Owt, at all.

The evening previously there'd been a "sportsmen's dinner" at the Holiday Inn in Seaton Burn, north of Newcastle, where a pint of flatulent Boddington's and a glass of Coke were together £5.45p and where Mr David Bassett was paid £1,300 to talk colourfully about the Crazy Gang, by which he didn't mean Bud Flanagan.

Three days afterwards there was a dinner at the Lancastrian Suite in Dunston to mark the golden jubilee of Northern Cross, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, at which the bishop had been clapped into the room to the tune of Wild Thing, by the Troggs.

The Rt Rev Kevin Dunn appeared neither wild nor even faintly narked. "It's certainly different," he said.

The night after that I was launching the Christmas tree festival at Bishop Auckland Methodist church, followed by what they called a "gourmet buffet". That grew on you, too.

Amid it all, there was just time for a quick Saturday lunch at The White Heifer That Travelled - there's a name to fill a column - on West Park, in Darlington.

West Park's new, an imaginative and idiosyncratically themed mix of housing and open space off the road out to Bishop. Once it was green belt, now green belt becomes noose. How long before Darlington and Bishop Auckland meet in the middle and Heighington - recently, if spuriously, named as Britain's best village - simply becomes the city centre?

The pub, built by Banks's and opened earlier this year, owes its name to the Darlington area's countrywide early-19th century dealings in prize cattle - Robert and Charles Colling, the Comet, the Durham ox.

It's formulaic but attractively done, five weeks to go and already twinkling for Christmas. Outside, a large sign promises the coldest beer in town, as if it were an incentive and not the perishing opposite. The smokers' patio, the fag end, stands desolate beneath nicotine November clouds. We're served by a nice lass, whom the till identifies as Tanya, who calls everyone "Darling" or "Lovey", except when there's a rush on and they become "Darl" for short.

The till, one of those clever-clogs computerised jobs, seems to be doing all right until someone asks if they can have garlic instead of Caesar sauce, upon hearing which it groans like Marley's ghost.

Periodically there's a sort of "Bing-bong" noise, too. Seasoned travellers would expect it to be followed by "attention train crew, disabled passenger alarm operated" and to be repeated about 30 times.

So how do you set out your stall to get folk into a new pub? Offer half-price weekend food before noon, do all-day "Curry club" meals for £4.95 - including a pint of lager - dangle two courses for £3.95 or "mega-meals", great overweight platters with 1lb of chips for around £8. They're all there.

How do you overturn the stall? Have laminated menus that appear not to have been wiped since the day the pub opened, tables which similarly need a howking, paper napkins which are taken away after every course and not replaced after any of them.

Serve lukewarm tomato and basil soup with burned bread, forget the dips with the "fully loaded skins", serve a spotted dick that wouldn't have earned a doctor's note.

The Boss had a main course of chicken, mushroom and onion fajitas which she thought every bit as good as Marks & Spencer's; the chicken seafood paella was OK but unexceptional, except that it contained chorizo sausage and that the little pile of vegetables appeared to have been plodging.

The service was generally competent and always affable, the Marston's Pedigree - one of three real ales - in first class order.

The Boss, ever charitable, suggested we go canny and we shall. You just can't teach your granny to suck eggs, that's all.

IN the Bay Horse in Heighington, where Darlington and Bishop Auckland will soon enough bump into one another, we in turn bump into George Romaines - once of the One O'Clock Show on Tyne Tees and asked the other day to sing in public for the first time in donkeys. It was an old friend's funeral, a special request from the dead man. The song? "Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye..."

BOLAM'S on the road to nowhere or, if not on the road to nowhere, then to Morton Tinmouth which may be much the same thing. On a nasty November afternoon, the sort which makes stopping at home to watch I'm a Celebrity almost enticing, the village pub was bouncing.

"I think we've lowered the average age by a few years," observed Dr Bob McManners, also in attendance, and it's rarely that can be said these days.

The most obvious explanation for its popularity is that, at lunchtime and before 7.30 most evenings, two meals from a lengthy list can be had for £6.95.

If not quite a loss leader, it's hardly going to send them rushing as tax exiles to the Cayman Islands - but the formula's so successful, they've just completed a big extension out the back.

Bolam's a mile or so off the A68, above West Auckland, population probably fewer than 100 and with commensurate locals' interest. An everyday story of Countryman folk would have seen it sold for housing, or a cattery, long since.

Foregoing the economy list - nearly Christmas - we had chicken kiev and peppered chicken and mushroom from the lengthy main menu. There were chips, too. "The healthy option," said Dr Bob, who's not been too clever himself and also fancied an afternoon in the Countryman.

Food's nothing swanky, understand, very much an all-purpose sauce and chips par-fried for the course, but this is a pub which not only knows its market and meets it but does it warmly on a bitter-cold day. Claire, the bonny blonde barmaid, should be declared a national treasure.

Desserts were £2.95, a pint of Castle Eden or Strongarm £2.35. Dr Mcmanners is founder of the Campaign for Real Authentic Puddings, best not written as an acronym, and was authentically impressed.

Rush over, the staff were debating who's to be bingo caller when Monday afternoon tea dances start, in January, in the extension. They'll probably be another step in the right direction. On the road to nowhere, all the signs point to success.

THE Blackfriars restaurant in Newcastle, about which we wrote last month, is the North-East finalist in a contest organised by Mouton Cadet to find the best Sunday roast dinner "with a touch of theatre". An associated survey of 2,000 diners found that North-East folk eat more roast dinners than almost anyone - 62 per cent at least once a week - and that's it's also the region where arguments are most likely to break out over a roast. It's most likely to be children under 12 who cause a scene - and most likely mum who's left to sort it out.

... and finally, the bairns wondered of we knew what you call a guard with 100 legs.

A sentrypede, of course.