ATTENTIVE readers have observed that, like those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the Eating Owt column frequently follows At Your Service, its ecclesiastical altar ego.

Thus two Sabbaths since, a first service for the Rev Julie Nelson in the rural parishes around Kirklington, near Bedale, and thence a mile or so up the lane to the Fox and Hounds at Carthorpe, which truly is Sunday best.

Firstly, however, a general confession to all those who believe that any Sunday lunch costing much more than £3 (the lot) doesn't just betray the eighth commandment (the one about pinching things) but the fourth, about dishonouring the seventh day, as well.

This one's £13.95, bairns £7.95, and worth every widow's mite of it. The irresistible comparison is with GNER, and the ever-widening gulf between standard and first class. This was first class.

Howard and Bernie Fitzgerald, now admirably assisted by their daughter Helen, have had the Fox for 21 years and for most of that time been writ large in the Good Pub Guide, the troughers' bible.

The 2004 edition proclaims a neatly kept and well run dining pub to which customers regularly return. It was seven-and-a-half years since we'd been, nonetheless.

Little has changed, save for the unmissable presence on the bar top of the 2003 Publican Newspaper award for Britain's best pub puddings, Helen's domain.

The bar is coal fired, the restaurant non-smoking, the gents' still stocked with eight different deodorants (which real men don't use, anyway, not even for the smell of success).

On the walls are some interesting old theatrical play bills, several featuring Mr Albert Modley and sundry supporting cast - a Modley crew as it were - in fonts from brazzend to brilliant.

The restrained music machine played old BBC theme tunes like Workers' Playtime, Two Way Family Favourites - appropriately for a Sunday lunchtime - and the interlude in which the potter wheeled. It also played The Archers.

After all these years with the dum-di-dum show, The Boss is off The Archers, chiefly because she doesn't like the vicar. About five million others use the same excuse for never going to church.

It's all very cosy, very convivial, redolent of Bielefeld, Bob Hope and Bisto and of sweet shops which sold things threepence a quarter.

County councillor Carl Les, also in attendance, recalled how he'd once been sent home, and with a note for his father, for eating black jacks at Leeming Village Sunday school.

He still vigorously protests his innocence, mistaken identity, would probably take it to the European Court of Human Rights if they were ever to chew over such trifles. (Come to think, you probably can't now call them black jacks, anyway.)

From the set menu we started with a giant Yorkshire pudding with a wonderful onion gravy in which all sorts of flavours - at one point even marmalade - richly suggested themselves.

The others had melon with fresh fruit and duck pate with a nice, crisp, imaginative little side salad.

The roast beef was tender, full flavoured and abundant and accompanied by a well kept pint of Black Sheep. The lamb was as pink as a newly plucked carnation, the Scottish salmon arrived with a hollandaise sauce that was confident and carefully executed.

The vegetables, six or seven of them, had to be accommodated on a side table, not so much an annexe as an overflow meeting.

There were exceptionally good roast potatoes, a dozen croquettes, lightly deep fried parsnips, swede, mangetout, carrots, probably something else. We'd only intended a few paragraphs, but this was making a meal of it. Then to the puddings, as central to the Fox's success as the award is to the bar top and not - as ever more is the culinary case - a necessary nuisance, a proprietary PS, an artless and ill considered afterthought.

Carl, who has a degree in grub and things from the University of Stirling, thought the rice pudding with a plum compote as good as any he could remember, the apple and cinnamon tart with home made ice cream was generous and no less memorable, the passion fruit tart with passion fruit ice cream followed on the menu by the promise "This is mouth watering."

It seemed like they'd forgotten the mother's mores about self-praise being no recommendation - probably they taught it at Leeming Sunday school, too, if only the kids had paid attention - but with every bite The Boss waxed equally enthusiastic.

At 3pm, we three the last to leave, the tables were cleared - a little too eagerly, we thought - and Howard, looking like a man who'd done a hard shift, emerged from the kitchen and poured himself a half from a keg beer dispenser.

Such stuff doesn't usually pass this column's lips, of course, but - one man's meat - the feller had abundantly deserved it. It is a place for which to give thanks.

* The Fox and Hounds, Carthorpe, near Bedale (01845 567433). Lunch and dinner, except Monday. Best to book; no problem for the disabled.

A VERY pleasant pint of Deuchars in the Burn at Willington - coal fired, well kept and convivial and, at the end of the bar, something we'd not seen for years. A game of shove ha'penny was in progress.

The world championships used to be held in Durham, we recall, though the shove ha'penny world - like the quoits world - was pretty narrowly encircled.

It's a pleasant and a proper pub game, for all that. When push comes to shove, isn't it time for a two-a-penny come back?

LAST week's column mourned the passing of Brian Skipp, a prince among pub landlords. The humanist funeral, and the wake back at the White Swan in Stokesley, were - it's reported - as good as these things get.

Lots of tributes, lots of ale afterwards and the jazz band playing what Eric Smallwood swears is a Louis Armstrong number called St James Infirmary. ("They put the words of Streets of Laredo to it.")

There was also a regretful e-mail from former Butterknowle brewer John Constable, a coincidence since Dave Wood - who runs the Captain Cook Brewery out the back of the Swan - mentioned Butterknowle Conciliation ale in his little speech. When they started, he said, he and Brian agreed that if they could make a beer as good as Conciliation, they they'd really have made it. Word is they're getting there.

WAITING for a train, Pete Winstanley from up Chester-le-Street way bought himself a first British donner kebab in years, having tasted them in Istanbul, Paris, Copenhagen and elsewhere. "I knew the British version was disgusting but I'd forgotten quite how bad," he reports.

Is there anywhere in the North-East, asks Peter, where he might find the true Turkish delight?

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's purple and burns like billy-oh.

The grape fire of London, of course.