Outside the big smoke

DUST to dust, ash to ashes, the North-East has its first entirely no-smoking pub. We had hoped to take lunch there with the admirable Mr Brooks Mileson, who goes rather heavy on the Lites, but unfortunately he was bad in bed and thus unable to get things off his chest.

Second choice was an English teacher of the column's close acquaintance, so desperately addicted that he may be found in the boiler room between lessons, drawing asthmatically upon experience.

Since it was term time, The Boss came instead. Though she hasn't smoked for 25 years, the single clause in the marriage contract, there was a time when she puffed so permanently that colleagues seeing her without a cigarette assumed she must have given up.

Now she displays the proselytic zeal of the reformed, or the reformer, and is wholly to be admired for it.

The Lambton Arms is at Eighton Banks, Gateshead, up the A1 to the Angel of the North roundabout and turn right on the road to Wrekenton.

"Admire the views over the Team Valley," urges the Good Beer Guide, though last Thursday was so murky that when a bus passed the front window it was possible to suppose there'd been a sudden eclipse. The pub's owned by Laurel Inns, whose policy is utterly and unequivocally to be applauded and who've been so encouraged by the increase in food orders they plan to extend the smoke-free zones throughout Britain.

"The staff were almost re-born, evangelistic in their fervour," an earlier customer had reported. It wasn't evident, though the no smoking signs were. All that was smoked was the salmon.

If they can have no smoking pubs, however, why not ban bandits - the Lambton's included a machine called Bat Outta Hell - piped music, flaky pastry pies and menus which use the word "drizzled"?

Though tolerably quiet, the music machine included that agonised female singing I Will Always Love You. The feeling was by no means mutual.

There were four real ales, all nationally familiar, all above £2. We thought about putting the drinks on the tab, but deemed it inappropriate in the circumstances.

Both pub and all day menu are pleasant, if predictable. There are beams, bare boards and piles of logs - the latest thing - with nowhere at all to burn them.

There is cod, cannelloni and Cumberland sausage, salmon and dill fishcakes, pork escalope, steak and ale pie and sticky toffee pudding. It is comfort food, food to stop smoking by, and may be rather more pleasant than a nicotine patch.

Pieces of Eighton, we began with "chicken, sweet cured bacon and warm poached egg salad" (£3.75) in a "balsamic honey mustard" dressing so scanty that it might have considered pole dancing as alternative employment.

The beer battered cod (£7.45) was definitely better than it looked, and lest the words damn and faint praise come to mind wasn't bad at all, save for its insubstantialness. It came with pleasant chips, peas and only half the bread needed to build a butty.

The Boss ordered a "classic" Caesar salad, was brought the chicken variety and sent it back. The replacement might have been all right, she supposed, save for the absence of anchovies, bacon and parmesan cheese. In other words, it was leaves and dressing.

She ordered lemon sole from the specials board, so special that there wasn't any. The replacement sea bass was cooked just as it should be, she thought. No complaints.

By 2.30, the sun was thinking about an appearance, the sky (she said) like a religious painting. We withdrew, as some smokers do, and breathed easy.

BARELY had he read hereabouts of the Slug and Lettuce on Newcastle Quayside than Allan Smart in Sedgefield discovered more of the same in his library book, "Tank Into Normandy" by Stuart Hill.

Hill talks of his public school education at Tonbridge, particularly a housemaster known as DCS given to illustrating battle tactics with the use of salt and pepper pots on the dinner table. Thus engrossed, DCS not only failed to spot the large slug which someone knocked out of the lettuce but similarly didn't notice when he swallowed it whole. "We were too hypnotised to speak," writes Hill, though Allan Smart has thoughts of his own.

"If that was Tonbridge," he says, "I'm rather glad I went to Kelloe Junior Mixed.

NEW Year's Eve, just hours ahead of the snow, we lunched at the Manor House Inn at Carterway Heads - A68, above Consett - with Canon Vincent Ashwin and his wife Angela, herself a Lay Canon of Newcastle Cathedral.

That morning, the way you do, she'd rung lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin in America. What was it that Lord Tennyson wrote about canons to the right of them, canons to the left?

Vincent retires this week after 36 years in the priesthood, preaches a final sermon at St John's, Shildon - where it began - this Sunday and then heads for a new home in Southwell (pronunciation varies) in Nottinghamshire.

Self-styled Thin Vin, he pronounced himself starving, nonetheless. The bairns call it Hank, rhyming slang, and since it was the season for charades, The Boss made to illustrate the point on an upright air guitar.

At last it struck a chord. The Cockneys mean Hank B Marvin. Rightly renowned, annually extolled in the Good Pub Guide, the stone built Manor House has "locals'" end, log fired lounge bar and attractively decorated restaurant where hundreds of jugs hang from the beams.

Well kept cask beers included Alastair Gilmour's Gold Ale from the Wylam Brewery in the Tyne Valley. Mr Gilmour, an amiable Scot, writes a beer column in Another Newspaper.

We drank his Hogmanay health, nonetheless. Most main courses are £11.95 in the restaurant, £1 cheaper elsewhere. The Boss thought her monkfish with a pepper crust and sweet red peppers one of the best and most innovative fish dishes in memory while chicken breast with feta cheese and apricot and calves' liver on onion mash were equally appreciated.

The column ordered pheasant with braised shallots, red wine and smoked bacon, the bird both peculiarly peppery and barely lukewarm, the broccoli as if it had been left out in the rain, the other vegetables a bit better. Still, we got back down the A68 before the snow did. Canon fodder, and making hay.

FOR reasons which need not be recalled, the column before Christmas wondered what happened to Arthur Mee, he of the Children's Encyclopaedia.

Born in 1875, Mee became editor of the Nottingham Evening Post at 20, published the first Children's Encyclopaedia in 1908 and founded the Children's Newspaper, his lifetime dream, thereafter.

Teetotal and a non-smoker, he died in 1943. The Children's Newspaper survived him by 22 years.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew the difference between a dog with fleas and a bored visitor.

One's going to itch, the other's itching to go.

Published: 13/01/2004