Early warming

NORTHALLERTON was once described as England’s wealthiest town, or words to that effect. Ten to nine on Saturday morning and it doesn’t much seem that way; the High Street’s up to 70 per cent off.

Almost every window discloses a sale; even the charity shops have them. Beneath a picture of a cruise liner there’s also a place offering January Sails, not a travel agency but the Skipton Building Society.

“If it’s like this in Northallerton, heaven help the rest of the country,”

says The Boss, but is cheered that at 8.55am there’s already a queue outside Bettys tea shop.

Bettys is a bit like the ravens in the Tower. If Bettys leaves North Yorkshire, we really are up the creek.

Breakfast, however, is to be taken at Lewis & Cooper, a similarly up-market emporium established in 1899. The telephone number was Northallerton 8, the ads promised discount coupons on any purchase over threepence and to exchange goods “without looking cross”.

The upstairs tea room was opened to mark the centenary, a civilised place with not just that day’s Echo (and Daily Telegraph) for perusal, but all manner of reading matter beneath the plastic topped table.

Beneath one setting, a learned etymological evisceration of Welsh rarebit. Beneath a second, some notes on Yorkshire oats. More musical chairs and a quote from Benjamin Disraeli: “Action may not bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

It was also Disraeli who described Youth as a blunder, Manhood a struggle and Old Age a regret. Queer lad, Dizzy.

The tea room also has rather a lot of notices. One warns to mind the edges of the fireplace – the fire is unlit – a second mercifully proscribes mobile phones, a third warns that the cost of cleaning will be added to the bill of anyone, even in Northallerton, who sticks chewing gum to the bottom of the chairs.

We sit by the window, overlooking the market stalls. It seems to lack something, probably bustle. In the corner there’s a company history cabinet, all silver sugar basins and model vans.

I order the Yorkshire breakfast, £8.95, English mustard additionally requested.

There should also be a notice warning “Beware of the mustard”, the product terrific, but the risk of spontaneous human combustion substantial.

The friendly young waiter returns, hot foot, announces that the mustard is Tracklements. The Boss, Welsh rarebit, knows of them. “They make good onion marmalade,” she says.

It’s all locally sourced. The single sausage is from Masham, the bacon delicious, the egg coddled. In turn it leads to another debate on the origins of the term mollycoddled.

The Boss thinks “molly” an old term for what would now be called an effeminate or gay man, and that Georgian London had Molly Clubs where such folk went to cross-dress.

“I could be wrong,” she says, but time and the Oxford Dictionary prove that she isn’t, of course.

She has scrambled egg and smoked salmon (£6.95), approves the substantial amounts of both, finds on the coffee menu something Kenyan that’s described as “light-bodied and elegant”.

“I wish I were light-bodied and elegant,”

she says, wistfully.

It’s a sustaining, satisfying, indeed invigorating, start to the day, the bill with coffee and one glass of freshly squeezed orange juice a little over £22.

For that price, it could be argued, so it should be – but Northallerton, even now, can afford it.

■ Since this is National Farmhouse Breakfast Week, Lewis & Cooper is offering its breakfast menu all day.

The store has also launched Bacon Butty Friday, the day of the week when bacon or sausage sandwiches and hot soup can be ordered in advance – 01609-766712 or, before 10am, kate@lewisandcooper.co.uk ALL this stuff about Little Chef, Heston Blumenthal and the lass from the branch at Skeeby – down the road from Scotch Corner – said to be Britain’s worst cook clearly fails to cut the Colman’s with a reader in Darlington.

He simply forwards a substantial Sunday Telegraph feature with a circle around the fact that Blumenthal is an Arsenal fan. See, he says, no taste at all.

RELISHING an excellent fish and chip supper at Clem’s in Bishop Auckland, last week’s Eating Owt regretted – ship and ha’porth of tar – the wretched quality of the paper napkins. (The comment about too much Lady in Red may be considered more jocular.) The day the column appeared, we lunched with Mr Alf Duffield – former chairman of Middlesbrough Football Club – at the Headlam Hall Hotel, west of Darlington.

Two courses are £12.50, three £15.

There are bottle conditioned Hambleton ales, good vegetables and there are paper napkins. If not exactly whirling the thing over his head, as Mr Michael Winner is said to do in order to attract attention, Alf alerted the waiter to the solecism.

“We only have proper napkins at night,” he said. “Lunchtimes we have paper napkins.”

Before someone spills the beans, it’s time for some decent napiery.

TIT-BITS – or to afford its full title, Tit-Bits From All the Interesting Books, Magazines and Periodicals of the World – was a magazine begun in 1881 by George Newnes. He ran a vegetarian restaurant to support it and was the first to offer accident insurance to his readers.

Early contributors ranged from H Rider Haggard to Isaac Asimov. Later it became a little more salacious, though never what you’d call full frontal.

I’m reminded of tit-bits by a secondhand volume – Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps – in the Village Bookshop in Middleton-in-Teesdale.

It’s £6.95.

Though it is greatly to be wondered how it’s possible to write a £6.95 book on chucking trifles to chickens, the Village Bookshop is clearly for the birds.

Also in the window are Ornamental Pheasants for Beginners and Domestic Ducks and Geese in Colour. There’s a book called A Thousand Senior Moments, too, but I forget what that one’s about.

I mention all that because straight across the road from the bookshop is the Country Style Bakery and Teashop, for which someone had not just sent a recommendation but the menu as well.

Location apart, what appears chiefly to justify the description “country style” these days is to have a collection of tea pots.

It was January 16, a small café and clearly popular, lots of folk wishing one another a happy new year. Maybe they don’t get out much in Middleton.

Three of us ate – bowl of vegetable soup, chicken burger, chilli, lasagne.

Total £23. It was all right.

A notice in another shop window sought the return of a polecat/ferret bitch – “very friendly and approachable”

– lost somewhere near the Strathmore Arms at Holwick. Probably it answers to Lorelei, or something.

Tit-bits, anyway.

WHILE in Middleton, a first visit since its reincarnation as a “community pub” – run by a trust and overseen by that now familiar “social entrepreneur”

Chris Jones – to the Bridge Inn. Canny drop of Ruddle’s, so far the only hand pump, but the community’s going to have to support it an awful lot more vigorously. Just one other customer throughout.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what breakfast cereal squeaks when the milk’s poured on.

Mice Krispies, of course.