Good Mannas

THE Shakespeare Lecture Hall, on no account to be confused with the celebrated pub of the same name – and in the circumstances unlikely to be – is in North Road, Durham, near the bus station.

These days it also offers a roof to the North Road Methodist church, while major refurbishment and disabled access work goes on, and to the Friday lunch club called Mannas.

Three fresh, manifestly homemade and thoroughly enjoyable courses will cost about £4.50 and still make a few bricks for the building fund.

Insane? Though this be madness yet there is Methodism in’t, as the Bard himself almost observed.

The temporary quarters do have their limitations, however. Up at the church they offer five or six hot dishes, in the lecture hall there’s just one cooker and they’re there all morning making soup – vegetable broth or pea and ham on this occasion.

The menu advises that they’re never too busy to talk or pray, though not even Brenda Rutherford’s sublime lemon, ginger and blueberry cheesecake is forced down the throat. It slides down, effortlessly.

The tables also carry one or two laminated texts, including Psalm 100 about singing to the Lord. Damien, the waiter, takes it so literally he essays a rendition of O What a Beautiful Morning, which may be the Rodgers and Hammerstein equivalent.

Not even their present constraints, however, can excuse the aberrant apostrophe. To the familiar commandments should be added an 11th – thou shalt not scatter apostrophes willy-nilly in the Book of Psalms. Ascetic extremists would add a subclause about serving flat Cola, an’ all.

The soup, with abundant fresh bread – it may be true that Man shall not live by bread alone, but you could make a good fist of it here – was followed from a wide choice by a corned beef sandwich with spicy homemade chutney, crisps and fresh salad. That might have edged up to £1.60. There are pubs which would not light the stove for £1.60.

Up the road there’s a Wetherspoon’s pub, known for inexpensive food. These guys make JW Wetherspoon seem exorbitant.

Brenda’s cheesecake had been made the previous evening. “Someone gave me a Hairy Bikers cookbook.

It was in there,” she said.

We also fell into conversation with Margaret Best, a lovely lady whose brother John – himself a Methodist minister – is among the 25-or-so resident population of Fair Isle, much the most remote of the Shetland Islands.

His family do everything from run the post office to drive the fire engine.

About a dozen of them work voluntarilyatMannas– lovely,smiling,cheerful folk led by Norma Nevin, a mission and development worker. “She makes it a time of laughter and caring amid the hard work,” says Margaret.

Just over 40 had eaten. They won’t make their fortunes or send the building fund through the roof, but they deserve to. Mannas from heaven, beyond doubt.

THE Rokeby Venus, so called because for much of the 19th Century it hung in Rokeby Park, near Barnard Castle, is a nude by the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.

Venus is portrayed backside first, looking into a mirror held by her son Cupid, the lad thus prevented from playing with his bow and arrows.

By 1914, the painting had been bought by the National Gallery and was vandalised by Mary Richardson, a suffragette nicknamed Slasher Mary on account of her propensity towards such wanton behaviour. She got six months.

Rokeby still has a copy. The Boss saw it a few years back, Venus’s poor posterior pockmarked with the bangon bullseyes of darts thrown by Philistine servicemen billeted there during the last war.

Rokeby Park’s now part of the Teesdale Way. There are also lots of sheep and llamas, who happily coexist.

The lady thought the only problem with llamas was that they were given to spitting, like camels and the cast of When the Boat Comes In, but this was a Sunday and they failed happily to live up to expectorations.

We walked the three or four delightful miles from Winston to Egglestone Abbey, where the Reverend Michael Wright, in Middlesbrough, had recommended a bite at the Monk’s Table tea room. Today’s column, in truth, may more closely resemble the Church Times leisure guide.

Egglestone Abbey was built in the late 12th Century, served until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by the so-called White Canons, known for their austerity.

The Monk’s Table is in a nearby cottage, menu and surroundings simple but by no means austere. There are four tables, 18 chairs, more in the garden. It wasn’t garden weather: a coal fire burned, appealingly.

There was mushroom and butterbean soup (£3.95), paninis (£4.50) with fillings such as sausage and field mushroom, goats’ cheese and roast vegetable and ham and mozzarella.

The average panini has quickly filled the hole left by the average pub toastie: pappy and pathetic.

These were very good.

Amanda Falshaw, the owner, opens from 10am from Thursday to Sunday, intends to close by 4-ish but has been as late as 6.30pm, such is the place’s popularity. She was worried, nonetheless.

One of her children had seen a film called Ratatouille, apparently about a nasty food critic. Could this one be a wolf in llama’s clothing?

No fears, we thought it excellent: smiling, semi-formal service, good strong coffee and what The Boss considered “grown up” coffee and walnut cake.

Like the Shakespeare Lecture Hall, a religious education.

HOMEWARD via the Four Alls at Ovington, between A66 and A67, we tried once again to taste Mithril Ales, and again in vain. Not yet on tap. The visit nonetheless revealed that the wholly ubiquitous Oie Shaw, 72-year-old doyenne of Thai pub food in the North-East, is now at the Four Alls from Wednesday to Friday evenings.

LEE Campbell, head chef at Starters and Puds in Newcastle – down the side of the Theatre Royal – has won the North-East Chef of the year competition after four unsuccessful attempts. The finalists had sight of a box of ingredients on the morning of the competition and had two hours 45 minutes to plan, cook and serve their meal.

Lee prepared a starter of seared salmon with spring vegetables and mussel and Craster kipper cream, a main course of herb-crusted rack of lamb with sauteed kidney, potato cake, pea and wild garlic soubise with pan juices followed by Redesdale cheese ice cream polenta and almond cake with caramelised pecans.

The restaurant’s owned by Darlington lad Dave Burrow who (as an earlier column observed) is altogether better at that than at playing dominoes. “We’re absolutely delighted,”

he says.

STILL more on rook pie, shortly to make a reappearance at the Nag’s Head, in Pickhill, near Thirsk.

Molly Fleetham, in Aldbrough St John, recalls childhood days in Elton, near Stockton, when the Ropner family would hold an annual shoot, serve the pie to tenants and friends and ensure there was plenty with which to wash it down. “I can’t remember what the pie was like,” says Molly, “but it was the only time in the year that I knew my father had had a drink.”

… and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a girl with a lawnmower on her head.

Mo.