Sunday is funky, punky night in The Waiting Room, but on Thursday lunchtime it's a much more peaceful place.

EVERY Sunday in a vegetarian restaurant called The Waiting Room in Eaglescliffe there's a night of music and set menu for £15, the lot.

Among much else, the accompanying literature promises jazz, folk and "perfect pop", international poets and "cabaret darlings", a chap on "didgeridoos and deep chants", another who plays Bob Dylan on ukelele and George Formby on acoustic guitar and a woman who sits behind a tartan-clad harmonium.

It's probably what clever folk call eclectic, and makes the rest of us wonder how an acoustic guitar can work off the eclectic.

Two nights ago, for example, the Waiting Room hosted the launch of an album called Wicked, Wicked Ways by someone called Andy Johnson.

The album, said the bumph, was "half jerky, funky grooves, half punky pop songs and explores such subjects as sexual harassment, the motivation of strippers, pessimism and teenagers growing up too fast. Funky, punky, loopy and lavish."

We'd have gone, of course, only it clashed with Last of the Summer Wine.

We went last Thursday instead, paid £22 for a three-course lunch with coffee and a couple of glasses of beer and richly enjoyed the change.

Eating alone, we took a copy of the Independent - if any national newspaper can be said to be vegetarian, it's probably the Indie. Just one other table was occupied, by a German family whose conversation would occasionally be peppered with phrases beyond the Teutonic ken, like "garlic bread", "lager shandy" and, more improbably, "Liberal Democrats".

Folk would occasionally wander in for sandwiches, too, fillings like brie and grape, roast pepper and cream cheese or hummus and fried tomato, all £4.50 and served with salad and crisps.

The walls were decorated with an exhibition of Richard Glynn's "Growing Green" photographs, the waitress - who looked a bit like that Barlow lass out of Coronation Street - with more tattoos than Edinburgh Castle. Deprived of the usual visual aid, we were unable to make out what they were all about, and it seemed a bit brazzened to ask. The music, some female, was happily subdued.

There were stripped pine tables and church pew chairs, sometimes with a novel - including Primary Glory by someone called Anonymous - where Hymns Ancient and Modern used to be.

There was also a copy of Vegetarian Britain in which the Waiting Room's entry seemed surprisingly prosaic. Co Durham's only restaurant entry was for the "omnivorous" Almshouses in Durham, said to be next to "cathedral and caste".

Of thousands, perhaps.

Presumably named because of its proximity to the station on the Darlington to Saltburn line, The Waiting Room is owned by Luke Harding, who bought it 18 months ago from his mum, and managed by Mark Ruddick, who's also the chef.

We started with a big bowl of thyme flavoured (and scented) broccoli and cream cheese soup - deeply flavoured, fragrant, truly delicious - and garlic bread which wasn't as good as that which the absent visual aid knocks up.

Other starters included roast mushroom and cashew nut pate, hummus and hot bread and grilled goats' cheese.

A main course, all £6.50, might have been a spinach, red chard and smoked cheese pancake, mushroom and leek stroganoff, penne pasta with pesto and olives or a piquantly different carrot, apple and cashew nut loaf served with a crisp salad - attractively presented and delightfully dressed - and enough funky, punky potatoes to feed a ground force.

The apple, raisin and ginger crumble came with ice cream which could have been cream or custard, the coffee was hot, strong and agreeably bitter, the organic beer was £2.75 and, being less than a pint, shouldn't have been anything of the sort.

A £22 lunch bill is more than most would usually wish to pay, of course, but for jaded vegetarians - or for those seeking temporarily to return to their roots - The Waiting Room may be music to the ears, whatever the day of the week.

* The Waiting Room, Station Road, Eaglescliffe, Cleveland (01642) 780465. Open lunchtime and evenings, seven days; one minute from Eaglescliffe railway station. No problem for the disabled. Sunday evening details on www.the-waiting-room.co.uk

Coming shortly, Citizen Zeitgeist and the Vain Glorious...

DURING the breakfast cook's continued absence we sought solace in the Crown Buttery, round the corner from the office. The breakfast (£3) was pretty good, the coffee (£1) pretty horrible. The real problem was the radio. Readers will know that for a column like this one, there's no good time to be assailed by music-based commercial radio but may imagine that nine o'clock on a Monday morning is worse than most. One of the numbers was by someone called Robbie Williams, whom we'd thought to be a Formula One racing driver. It was called Let Me Entertain You. He had to be joking.

Bishop Auckland Rugby Club is down by the Wear at Newton Cap, attractively situated but much too prone to flooding for the cricketers who share the facilities on the rare occasions when rain fails to stop play.

King James I Cricket Club has been run for 25 years by John Raw, but now he's easing up a bit. "I used to be This, That and T'other, now I'm just That and T'other," he said over a half of Old Slapper (or some such).

It was there that the self-styled Weird Ale Warriors of Wear Valley CAMRA held their beer festival last week, obliged to call time at 5pm on Saturday because the reggar beggars were staging something called Dangle in the Dust, described as a "comedy drama" set in a rugby club.

Warning, said the posters, this play contains very strong language and some male nudity.

The beer festival contained no such thing, just rather a lot of men with beards - almost obligatory for CAMRA members, hair of the dog, presumably - and a quiet enthusiasm that they're winning the fight to irrigate one of Britain's last great real ale deserts.

The admirable Simon Gillespie at the Grand in Bishop Auckland plans in July to open a brewery out the back - his partner's an Inland Revenue man - the Toronto Lodge is selling beers from the Durham Brewery, a hand pump in the Derby now makes waiting at Bishop bus station almost bearable and they've even reached the parts of Crook which other beers had hitherto failed to assuage.

There's real ale at both the Sun and the Surtees. "It's going really well," said Trevor Hudspeth at the Surtees. "There are people in Crook who thought the only beer in the world was John Smith's Smooth."

The other hot topic was the Village Chippy in Frosterley, drooled over hereabouts a month ago. "Half the county seemed to be queuing up," reported Paul Dobson. "It was abundantly worth the wait."

PINCHINTHORPE Hall, outside Guisborough, has retained its AA food rosette - after the inspector was bewitched by the burgers. Not the usual AA fare, he conceded, but these were from Pinchinthorpe's own Dexter herd, the smallest cattle in Britain but pretty huge on flavour. Pinchinthorpe Hall also brews its own beer, has an organic kitchen garden open to the public on weekdays between 9.30-4pm and a farmers' market on the first Sunday in the month.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call high rise flats for pigs.

Sty scrapers, of course.