On the column's return to the Chapel Farm Tea Room, in Whaw, on D-Day, the sandwiches were still the best in in Britain

ON the 60th anniversary of D-Day, though the timing was pure coincidence, we again went to Whaw. It's a blissful hamlet in Arkengarthdale, North Yorkshire, where in July 2002, we had eaten by far the finest sandwich in 17 years before the gustatory plough.

That simple lunch was so magnificent, the subsequent report so rapturous, that Joyce Best found herself self-raising with the larks in order to meet demand.

Though the multitudes have diminished, little else has changed save that the original column is now photocopied in the front of the menu and the Guardian's passing reference remaindered to the lavatory wall. For 17 years, read 19.

On a perfect Sabbath, we sat unrecognised in the idyllic little tea garden with the stone topped tables and Mothers' Meeting chairs, reading Max Hastings' impressive Sunday Telegraph report from Normandy.

Inside the Chapel Farm Tea Room a coal fire burned as bright as it was improbable. Outside or in, the world floated on a veritable sea of tranquillity.

The Boss, waxing whimsical, for some reason suggested that people shouldn't be given anti-stress pills but allotments. What they should really be given is a ticket to the North Yorkshire dales, though not all at once as it would rather defeat the object.

The soups, lentil or tomato and butterbean, were hearty and home made, the cakes deserve a column of their own but it is the "open" sandwiches - not even a Crooklok could close them - which particularly demand attention.

We shared chicken mayonnaise and hummus and olives, each piled high on three slices of granary bread and abundantly set about with baby sweetcorn, fresh tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, radish and things doubtless forgotten.

They're around £3.50 and you pay almost as much for sandwiches, battery sandwiches, made in Milton Keynes or somewhere and ferried furiously up the overnight M1.

These are free range and range from wonderful to incomparable. If there are better sandwiches in Britain, we have not yet had the happy pleasure of their acquaintance.

Home baking included plum crunch, marmalade bread, orange and something flapjacks. Toast is "proper Aga", scones "midget" - and doubtless midget gems - prawns are said to be "proper prawns, the sort you wouldn't mind taking home to your mother".

Lest the phrase sound familiar, we used it in 2002, its piscine provenance duly acknowledged on the menu.

With a soft drink apiece - lemon Coke, a first - and a large cafetiere of excellent coffee, the bill for two reached £18.

It was perfectly peaceful, sublimely civilised, and on D-Day of all days, we should be thoroughly grateful for such things.

EVIDENCE of global warming, probably, Peter and Sheila Crosby at the ever-excellent Ship at Hesleden - landlocked a mile or two inland from Blackhall on the east Durham coast - have started growing their own grapes. Peter supposes that making his own wine may be a bit ambitious - "but instead of having three or four grapes on their cheeseboard, everyone can have a bunch".

AFTER a period off the rails, Locomotion One at Heighington station is up and running again and was where our journey began last Friday evening. Firstly, however, two words of clarification.

1. Heighington station is nowhere near Heighington. Though closer to the village from which it takes its name than, say, Dent - five hard miles from the Cumbrian community it purports to serve - only the misguided Heighington visitor would travel by train.

2. The automaton which now provides public address announcements on all but the biggest stations insists upon referring to it as "Hay-ington" and needs elocution lessons. It's "High-ington." Whatever would the robot make of Pantyffynnon (Table 129).

The Loco was once the world's first station ticket office, rightly retains railway connections and won a solid fuel award a few years back for Britain's best pub fire. No need, of course, last Wednesday.

Several real ales included Magnet (£2.10) and Hogshead (3.5abv, £2.30 real money). The menu offered two evening meals for a tenner but since it was all bread and butter - lasagne, curry, sausage and mash, half a chicken - we shunted off to the Bay Horse instead.

Unlike the station, the Bay Horse is definitely in Heighington. Facing the village green, it's reckoned 300 years old and to have been a haunt of royalty, or possibly royalists.

Maybe it was for that reason that St George flags covered every ceiling. Cry God for Harry...

The bar meal menu was more extensive, the operation rather less than frill a minute. There may be more frills on a flannelette nightie.

What about a plate for the bread? Or a knife for the fish and chips? A teeny-weeny smile? The Boss wondered if the waitress had been on a course to acquire so blank an expression, or if it came naturally. (One of the others, it should be said, was charming.)

The French onion soup was OK but seems to have become standard issue, the "giant" cod and chips (£6.25) lived wholly up to the description, accompanied by 37 peas and chips which, as they say, were nowt ower. The fish, however, was hot, fresh and strong on flavour.

The Boss's halibut came artlessly arranged on a sort of ciborium - ask the nearest Roman Catholic - and looked a bit like a magazine advert for Brock's fireworks.

It was ludicrous, entirely unnecessary, scattered stuff everywhere. Is some poor YTS kid employed out the back to present things this way, or has some mad professor invented a machine for that patently perverse purpose?

We passed on pudding and went home. Heigh-ho, as probably they say on branch line stations everywhere.

FURTHER to last week's note that the new Wetherspoon's in Bishop Auckland will be called the Stanley Jefferson, a voice-mail message from Pete in Durham - sorry, Pete, one digit short of a call-back - claims that Stan Laurel changed his name because Stan Jefferson had 13 letters and he considered it unlucky. "It's to be hoped," adds Peter, "that Wetherspoon's doesn't find it unlucky, too".

LAST week's stroll along South Gare - that fascinating breakwater near Redcar - noted that it had been opened in 1888 by W H Smith, the First Lord of the Treasury - "not, presumably, of the paper shop". Yes he was, as former Vaux Group managing director Frank Nicholson has been first to point out.

Smith, grandson of the newsagency's founder in 1792, was also First Lord of the Admiralty from 1877-80, becoming the subject - the object, perhaps - of Gilbert and Sullivan's best known song from HMS Pinafore:

I polished up the handle so carefully

That now I am the ruler of the Queen's navy...

That column also recalled that the Gare's post-launch banquet was held in the Royal Ecchange at Middlesbrough, demolished in 1985 to make way for an A66 flyover.

Perhaps, muses Frank, the catering was by J H Graham, who owned several pubs in the Boro and whose company was part of the Sunderland-based North Eastern Breweries which in 1927, merged with C Vaux Ltd to become the now lamented Vaux Brewery.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you get by crossing a snowman with a vampire.

Frostbite.

Published: 15/06/2004