It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Father and son are hot on the trail of a tasty little tale.

CHIP off the old block, the bairn has been doing work experience - a euphemism generally meaning to sit around like a nun at a naughty knickers party - here at the Priestgate pleasuredrome.

The Echo treated him very well. His daily labour at an end, it was time to show him how the Eating Owt column operated, though it didn't at all work out as planned.

Firstly, however, an overdue explanation. Finics - like cynics, but finicky with it - have long suggested that since the jokes at the foot of the column have been around for as long as it has, the "bairns" must be almost as ancient as the jokes.

It's true. The boys who launched a thousand quips - what's purple and 400 miles long? What does a Frenchman have for breakfast? - are now 19 and 22. Number two son reads politics at Nottingham but yearns only to be a journalist, like the old folks back home.

He'll prosper. "There's an apostrophe out of place," he said, as we studied the menu - dad and lad bonding over the biryani - at Reema, a "contemporary Indian" restaurant in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington.

The menu also talked of a "twist of Britishness", which may be a reference to the incomparable Mr Tony Mummery, the owner's Arsenal supporting assistant.

Tony, an English gentleman as refined as two pounds of sugar, is given to a Jeeves-like deference in which Christian names are considered gross over-familiarity.

"Tony," we have urged over the years, "will you please call me, Mike."

"Ah do forgive me, I am so sorry, Mr Amos."

We were first in at 6pm, greeted with great civility and, happily, unrecognised. The bairn proceeded to unfold his napkin and then to pleat it into a fan shape, a trick he learned while doing holiday shifts at the Scotch Corner Hotel.

That was a work experience, an' all.

On two levels, the restaurant is attractively and appealingly furnished, the only problem that the needle on the music machine kept sticking in the middle of Nights In White Satin, a lighter shade impaled.

The experience, like the room, could thereafter be divided into two - pre and post-Mohammed.

Mohammed's the owner, 25 years in Darlington and with a takeaway in Gladstone Street. He's round, jolly and generous and he turned up shortly after we'd ordered. We were clocked at once, declined five seconds later a complimentary bottle of wine and awaited the meal.

It was very, very good. From a lengthy carte the bairn ordered onion bhajee and lamb passanda, a mild dish with fresh cream and "special" spices.

His dad's chicken chat was followed by chingiri jhole, said to be from an ancient recipe of Bengali fisher folk and comprising king prawns in a sauce simmered in coconut milk.

"Variation dishes" the menu called them, though the variation was on numerous themes and from several regions. The meal was as delicious as it was different.

Simultaneously, however, arrived a sizzling tandoori mixed grill, a bowl of Bombay potatoes, some garlic naan and one or two other things.

The waiters said the extras were compliments of management, and finally insisted that the entire meal was on the house. Both opposed to such things and convinced that they are counter-productive, we demanded to see Mohammed.

"He's upstairs," they said, with the mysterious finality of a Victorian euphemist suggesting that his grandfather had gone to a better place. It is impossible, for all that, to suppose that he has not repeated the welcome, the conviviality and the generosity of spirit - if not of the final reckoning - many times.

The bairn was hugely impressed. Next term at Nottingham they might even teach him the observation of the American economist Milton Friedman that there is no such thing as a free dinner and invite him to write a dissertation on it.

But if this were journalism, he concluded, he might just develop the taste.

THUS exhausted, the apprentice headed homeward. The master still had two more assignments that evening, though whether either could be termed a work experience is, of course, a matter of opinion.

The first was at Darlington Cricket Club, recently voted the local CAMRA branch's club of the year and presently into bat with an excellent pint of Strongarm. The second was at Darlington Central WMC, Beaumont Street, which covets the cricketers' title.

They've reintroduced real ale, first time in most memories and just £1.50 a pint. Marston's Pedigree is a thoroughbred fixture, with a regularly changing guest which last week was Spitfire from Shepherd Neame.

"We've a bar full of leading brand names, this just tops it off," said steward Phil Armstrong, formerly at the Kings in Leyburn.

With Paul Woodmansey from Wolverhampton and Dudley Brewery, we spent an hour there, a quiet Tuesday. No one else ordered real ale. "It'll take time to settle," said Phil, appropriately.

The initiative deserves to succeed a) because it takes a lot of bottle to have real ale in a workmen's club and b) for the poor steward's sake. "If it doesn't take off," he said, "I get hanged."

THE lad who seeks to write may by no means be considered the finished article, of course. We also took him to the Quaker Coffee House in the town centre, Darlington CAMRA's pub of the year and with eight hand pumps - soon to be ten - impeccably paraded on the bar. He ordered a pint of Grolsch.

LAST week's column on Eggleston Hall boasted about the wonders of the human memory and, inevitably, was forgetful. Eggleston's village polliss in the early 1970s was certainly Russell Elliott, but he was PC 1281, not 1288.

Eggleston was in Durham constabulary; Romaldkirk - less than a mile up the road - was in the North Riding.

Later sergeant at Middleton-in-Teesdale, Russ is long retired, lives in Escomb near Bishop Auckland and for the past 13 years has been an adviser to Crook Citizens' Advice Bureau. "Ah," he says, "happy days."

LAST Wednesday's Guardian carried a feature on the Pork Pie Appreciation Society, based in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, followed at once by two unsolicited letters in praise of Petch's of Great Ayton.

The first, from London, praised "flavoursome meat and perfect pastry", the second was from the Rev Tony Bell, former vicar of Byers Green - near Spennymoor - and leading official of the clergymen's branch of Unison.

Mr Bell not only endorsed the high praise but was anxious, for reasons not altogether clear, to make clear that Great Ayton was near Potto.

It's also just a couple of miles from Stokesley, where the column addresses the Rotary Club tonight. Perhaps there'll be something unexpected on the plate.

PURPLE and 400 miles long? The grape wall of China. Frenchman's favourite breakfast? Huit heures bix.

The bairns, bless 'em, would today like to know the difference between an engine driver and a teacher.

One minds the train, the other trains the mind.