Kisses from the Owl

THE Tawny Owl is "just south of Darlington's over-sized football stadium." It says as much in the new Guide to Real Ale In and Around Darlington and Teesdale and since the guide is magnificent - and free, like the best things in life - who's to argue?

It's compiled - "Editing, design, text, shoddy maps and half-decent images" - by Brendan Boyle, who knows his beer and may also know his food, which is why he says little about it. The town, at least, is dreadfully served for pub grub.

So we landed at the Tawny Owl, just across the ring road, and Brendan would at once have been impressed by the barmaid who examined the ordered pint of Landlord, declared it too cloudy and not settling and offered a nice pint of Bass instead.

She was just as helpful over the wine. Full marks, good start.

The Tawny Owl's part of a rustic, rust-resistant pub chain - Brendan calls a nearby link "designer-aged" - with piles of logs for fires which will never burn and lots of copies, autonomously unread, of The Independent. It'll still do no harm to the circulation figures.

As immodest as it is inaccurate, the menu describes it as "another beautiful attraction for the city of Darlington".

Among several blackboards, one announces that Bass was first brewed in 1777, that 500 barrels lie at the bottom of the Atlantic with the Titanic and that when Concorde was Christened, they wanted nowt-so-common as champagne and used Bass instead. Someone may know if the last bit's true.

It was Tuesday evening, almost empty, service at table just as pleasant as it had been behind the bar.

The spoon indicated that we occupied table 49. There are those of us not just old enough to remember PC 49, in the Eagle comic, but Sgt 49, who was George Elliott, stationed at Crook (your worships).

We also recalled the old joke about why owls don't go out courting when it rains. Because it's too wet to woo.

We started with something called bang bang chicken, skewered, with a peanut and sesame sauce. It may not perhaps be said that the man who invented bang bang chicken should be shot - though the sauce was a bit strange - but a skewer which broke off at a touch was every bit as dangerous.

Chicken, leek and Wiltshire ham pie followed, and was in turn mentally followed by the ineluctably seductive voice of the temptress from the Marks & Spencer commercials. "This is not just ham, this is Wiltshire ham." It was substantial, four-sided, doubtless prefabricated elsewhere but with short pastry and perfectly good. The chips fell less agreeably from the production line.

The Boss began with salmon and broccoli fishcakes - "plenty of potato, but still fine" - followed by sea food salad. It was OK, honest.

The bill, with a couple of drinks either side, amounted to £37. It was signed - a first, this - with thanks from Emily and with a couple of kisses. It wasn't for that reason - not to let on, anyway - that we left the team a tip.

THE Darlington CAMRA guide is the sort of book for which a stranger in town would cheerfully pay a couple of quid and still think he'd got a bargain.

Last year they printed 3,500, upped this time to 5,000. "We thought keeping it free was absolutely essential," says Brendan. "They're being snapped up very quickly."

Their patch embraces 130 real ale pubs from Aycliffe in the north and across to the Cleveland border, south to the Great Smeaton area and westbound either side of the A66.

There's not just meticulously detailed information on pubs and their beer range but little local nuggets, too. Who otherwise might have known that the Model T in Darlington was designed by John Poulson - "the 1960s architect and fraudster" - or that the world's first passenger train stopped at the Fighting Cocks in Middleton St George?

It's full colour, beautifully produced, enthusiastically executed. Wise owls wouldn't be without one.

CLEVELAND CAMRA's newsletter reports campaigns and petitions against the removal of Strongarm from what are now Marston's owned pubs - formerly Wolverhampton and Dudley - and a semi-reassuring letter from the brewery boss. "Pubs may, subject to the necessary quality relayed throughout criteria, continue to stock Strongarm where consumer demand exists." I'm doing me best, honest.

AFTER a week of Shetland's mellifluously distilled atmosphere, the first clear-the-air English pub we visited after the smoking ban was the Jolly Drovers at Leadgate, near Consett.

Notices around the place advised that they could do it together - stop, that is - or, failing that, in the beer garden. The bar was bedecked with lots of paper St George's flags and with a mural of the good knight taking on the dragon, or dragging as the case may be.

The restaurant appeared more exotic, full of faux Egyptian artifacts - mummicry? - and hung like a Babylonian garden. The place mats appeared all to bear pictures of Chipping Camden, which doubtless is a very nice place but may not be among the wonders of the world.

The Drovers was long a Vaux pub, some of the Sunderland signs remaining. CAMRA's Good Beer Guide, which is very enthusiastic, advises that the beer range "varies".

While the beer may change, on this occasion the variation was Black Sheep bitter or Black Sheep bitter.

The atmosphere's as jolly as promised, service swift, the barman a bit like a north Durham version of him - Dave, was he not? - behind the bar of the Winchester Club in Minder.

Bar food's from a lengthy menu wrinkled like a laminated Mick Jagger, plus specials boards. "Cheap and cheerful" may sum it. Though the music machine played "Mouldy old dough", the corned beef pie was substantial and entirely acceptable, The Boss lukewarm about the chicken curry.

It didn't much matter. Neither of us coughed once.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a nun who walks in her sleep. A roaming Catholic, of course.