THE Northern Echo's health editor is a man who lives rigorously up to his job description, a Dr Feelgood among medical journalists. The estimable and award winning Barry Nelson is sensible to the point of austerity, a walking Government health warning, a man born with the maxim "Moderation in all things" silk sewn onto his diapers.

Before Christmas he went still further, one of the late December papers devoting the best part of a pound for pound page to how Barry and his wife Marj had lost excess baggage with Weight Watchers.

Barry's 6ft 3ins and had weighed 15-and-a-half stones.

Some of us last weighed 15-and-a-half stones at the child health clinic, when Ostermilk was given out with the orange juice.

Doubtless the Weight Watchers piece was intended to serve the same purpose as the Ghost of Christmas Future, a warning that unless ways are mended and waistlines trimmed - unless, as Dickens put it, these shades are altered - it would be bed curtains for the gluttonous...

It was last Tuesday evening, Tenth (or possibly eleventh) Night, the Carlbury Arms at Piercebridge. The next morning we were due back at work after the hyperbolic holiday.

Just after the garlic bread, half way through a second pint and a vast bowl of enjoyable but seriously salty chips, Barry entered like Marley's spectre, save for the cash boxes cacophonous behind him.

Marj was there, too, and Barbara, his mother-in-law, waxing wonderfully about the rack of lamb.

Would Nelson turn a blind eye to the over-indulgent at the news room's opposite extreme? What would he make of the chap on the next table with a steak so well done it might have worn a number 15 shirt and kicked penalties for the All Blacks?

What would he have made of the bowls of broccoli, of carrots and of cauliflower, wholly healthy and almost assiduously untouched?

Barry's arrival really was coincidental. Though there are far worse pubs, we were in the Carlbury for reasons unconnected with personal wellbeing.

Piercebridge is five miles west of Darlington, once a Roman settlement but now home to no more than 200 people. For all that it retains both Anglican and Methodist churches, their combined attendance rarely more than ten, and two licensed premises.

The George, on the southern bank of the Tees, is famed for much more than its stop-go grandfather clock, though the bit in the brochure about being "situated in the stunning Yorkshire dales" may have been stretching things a little.

The Carlbury, at the other end of the village, has more admirers than the health editor's mother-in-law as well.

Now the Carlbury has been bought by London and Edinburgh Inns, which also owns The George - a quarter of a mile and another county away.

Especially in the age of ecumenism, comparison with the churches is irresistible: different style, but now both serving the same Master.

Like most of the rest of the village, the Carlbury had already abandoned Christmas, a morose pile of crackers in the corner alone recalling the jollity of a few days before.

We pinched and pulled one, the joke about why Santa's little helper was depressed - because he has low elf-esteem - and a pair of plastic scissors which broke on impact.

Only the brave tree outside St Edmund's church suggested that two days of Christmas remained, that pipers might yet be piping and a dozen drummers still waiting their turn. How bizarre that we promote Christmas from October onwards and abandon it before it's barely had time to make itself comfortable.

The evening menu, chiefly restricted to steak and chicken, had no vegetarian main courses and save for a standard scampi, nothing that was piscine, either - which is not so suggest that they didn't make a decent fist of things.

The garlic bread (£2.50) was succulent enough, the mushrooms with port and stilton sauce (£5.25) had all the advertised ingredients. The Boss had the scampi, we the chicken with a creamy Coverdale sauce the colour of a hospital bathroom and with lukewarm bacon scattered distractedly atop.

They'd Black Sheep and something prosaically called Carlbury House Bitter, brewed by Darwin in Sunderland though not one of its classics. They will insist on playing the wretched radio.

The George, to which we repaired for the possibility of pudding, had splendid open fires burning huge lumps of coal - what the colliers called roundies - big leather armchairs, Deuchars award winning IPA, three different hand pulled ales and precious few customers.

In the event we forewent the pudding. The health editor would have been proud.

WE appear to have something in common with Simon Hoggart - Parliamentary sketch writer of The Guardian, wine critic of The Spectator and lover (with David Blunkett and others) of Kimberley Quinn, the Spectator's publisher.

The Times has even suggested that The Spectator should be renamed The Active Participant, though it is not Mrs Quinn we have (or have had) in common.

Like Simon, it transpires, we treasure the Good Pub Guide (Ebury Press, £14.99) when adrift on distant motorways. In Derbyshire at Christmas we left the M1 at junction 29 and found the Hardwick Inn as handsome and as agreeable as the GPG had supposed.

The Hoggarts, returning from sanctuary in Scotland, sought similar counsel and lunched at the Nag's Head at Pickhill, a mile off the A1 near Thirsk.

"Everybody's notion of the perfect pub," writes Simon in The Guardian, praising particularly a "scrummy selection" of toasted bar meals like hot smoked salmon on pain rustique or club sandwiches on ciabatta.

As Eating Owt readers have long been aware, it is usually impossible to disagree.

FEW pubs in recent memory have been more perfect than the Abbey Inn at Byland, near Coxwold in North Yorkshire. An ecstatic Sunday lunch review (Eating Owt, December 14) elicited echoes of approval from readers across the region.

Two weeks later, however, the Darlington & Stockton Times reported that owners Martin and Jane Nordli had sought planning permission to change pub into private house.

Observations had to be in by December 27; we await developments apprehensively.

PLANS are afoot, we hear, for a restaurant in a former dress shop in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington. It'll be called Hash. Taties and what, then?

HIS e-mail headed "Dulci et decorum est, pro patria mori" - someone may be able to translate - John Briggs in Darlington attempts to resolve the riddle of the phrase about food (or whatever) to die for, raised here two weeks ago.

Both his preferred options are Japanese, the first that the highest honour for any Japanese citizen was "to die for the emperor". The second, says John, is that the Japanese eat fugu - poisonous puffer fish - a rare and expensive delicacy but lethal if cooked incorrectly.

He prefers the second alternative, but possibly not to die for.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what sits in a fruit bowl and cries for help.

A damson in distress.