A second attempt to visit a much recommended Dales cafe not only paid dividends but also earned the highest accolade.

IT'S Middleton-in-Teesdale and the bush telegraph's humming. Word has travelled from the paper shop to the grocer's, from the grocer's to the shoe shop and from the shoe shop via the white man's speaking machine direct to Cornforth and Cornforth.

"The big feller's back," drum the tom-toms. "It looks like he's heading your way."

It wasn't entirely surprising. We'd written of an abortive visit to Middleton just three weeks ago, frustrated after an enthusiastic recommendation from a canny correspondent to find Cornforth and Cornforth shuttered.

Others had written subsequently, largely (though not unanimously) in acclamation. "The cappuccino's to die for," a lady in the paper shop had said, though another added that she'd rather open a tin of Heinz than bother with the Cornforths' celebrated soups.

"I wouldn't go to Morpeth either, if I were you," she added, slightly curiously.

It should at once be said, therefore, that this was not only the finest and best value lunch of all time but an easy going, invigorating and immensely enjoyable experience, extravagant in all except the expense account.

Cornforth and Cornforth is wonderful, and so are they. Put that on the message board in Middleton.

John and Viv Cornforth had been in London, where he was a lawyer ("I got out, you had to be a s**t to be a lawyer") and she had a pub food franchise in Wandsworth. Subsequently they lived near Exeter, where John would get letters for the Exeter City FC manager who shared his name, moved to the Durham dales last summer to be nearer Viv's parents in Whitburn.

They love it. "We'll either have to be carried out in a white van or a black estate car," says John.

The cafe is small and imperfectly formed, which is exactly as it should be. Formerly a private front room, it's now home to just three rustic tables - John's a woodworker - a dozen or so church pew chairs and an idiosyncratic array of nick-nackery, tick-tockery and tea-pottery.

There's the sort of log fire you want to take home in a box, a ship's prow a bit like Dainty Dinah used to be, a picture of the HMV dog - whose name escapes - colourful candles, spice jars, old scales, jumbled joys.

Ruby, a black labrador of sorts - there is no record of a black labrador successfully suing for libel, not even with a lawyer as its master - sauntered out, sniffed disdainfully, returned promptly to her doggydins.

The phone rang out the back. It was the shoe shop. Viv said nowt; monkey. We guessed; cobblers.

The menu changes daily, chalked on a little blackboard which might have been borrowed from Miss Jean Brodie. Last Thursday lunchtime's was:

Pasta bean broth (£4), spicy chicken in a lemon sauce with cous-cous (£5), roast salmon with hollandaise sauce (£5), ham and eggs with hash browns (£4.50), panini stuffed with roast pork and caramelised peppers (£3.50), leek and gruyere tart (£4), warm brie with wild blueberry conserve (£4).

It would be a hard heart which failed to suppose that on paper, or slate, it represented a pretty good bargain. On the table, it merited only astonishment.

We ordered the spicy chicken, preceded (like almost everything else) by a large basket of warm and wonderful organic bread made at the Village Bakery up the street and accompanied by a deep salad bowl which, had it alone been a fiver, would have been considered in many restaurants to be a loss leader.

The Boss was in Newcastle that afternoon. The temptation was to ring her, put lunch on hold, and demand she get herself toot sweet to Teesdale.

The chicken was indeed a rare bird, plump too, the sauce bittersweet and vibrant, the portions vast. The salad, dressed to kill, contained olives, grapes, apple, orange, cucumber, tomato, lovely leaves and other things doubtless forgotten.

It was impossible to remember being so excited about an eating place. It was almost impossible, truth to tell, to remember being excited at all.

We ordered a cappuccino, announced ingenuously that the lady in the paper shop said it was to die for, asked about a light pudding.

"I'll have a shufty in the fridge," said Viv, returning to Whitburn ways, and returned with a venially outsize bowl of chocolate mousse and vanilla ice cream, home made and at £1.50 absurdly inexpensive. "It's better than the cappuccino," she said.

None of the thirsting thimbles so presently popular, the coffee arrived in a cup so big that Britain's Olympic diving team could have practised there without fear of bashing out brains on the bottom.

The bill, including a proper Coke in a waisted bottle, reached £9. £9 the whole lot. Fair to Middleton? Absolutely stupendous.

* Cornforth and Cornforth, 16 Market Place, Middleton-in-Teesdale. (01833) 640300. Open every day except Wednesday until around 5pm, 7pm or so after Easter. Difficult for the disabled, unlicensed, bed and breakfast, too.

CLUED-UP caterers, of whom there are several, will have divined that it's usually a Wednesday evening on which the column prowls about, seeking whatsoever it might devour. There are several reasons for the midweek link, chiefly to do with football.

It was a surreptitious Saturday when we looked into the Blacksmiths Arms at Preston-le-Skerne, however. She was in mourning for Adam Faith, a first love, we for the Arsenal, Chelsea having equalised so late it was nearly past the watershed.

Preston-le-Skerne is on the back road from Newton Aycliffe to next to nowhere, the pub known for generations as the Hammers. A preface to the menu welcomes well-behaved children to the beer garden but warns against chasing the peacocks or teasing the guard dogs.

Whichever the more vengeful, neither is greatly to be recommended.

It being a) perishing and b) pitch black, we ate inside instead. The menu proved quite difficult to read - several others within earshot having left spectacles in pinny pocket, or whatever - but rewarded perusal, nonetheless.

Guest beers included Mansfield Bitter, a distinguished ale from an otherwise unremarkable Nottinghamshire town (whose MP, coincidentally, is a former merchant seaman from Newton Aycliffe).

The menu is fairly straightforward, proper pub food with a couple of twists, several sections offering two meals for a tenner, or thereabouts.

The Boss - whose heart long throbs for lubricious Mick Jagger, oh she of little faith - ordered Maryland crab cakes followed by a vegetarian chilli which offered both warmth and light. The chips were disappointing, she thought, and as usual she thought correctly.

The mushroom soup was very good indeed - deep, spicy, faintly alcoholic - the "pork parmesan" was a breadcrumbed escalope with a creamy sauce, carefully cooked vegetables, including garlic courgettes and lovely saut potatoes - as robust as the chips were insipid.

Two courses for two cost £21, comfort food in both cases. A country pub warmly to be recommended.

PS to last week's note that Sam Smith's Brewery has frozen the price of its beer, not least at the Glittering Star in Darlington, for 12 years.

A survey by Darlington's Campaign for Real Ale branch reveals that, last year alone, the price of the average standard strength pint in the town rose by 5.2 per cent to £1.87, twice the rate of inflation.

At the Glittering Star, says CAMRA, the price of Old Brewery Bitter has risen - because of excise duty and things - by 8p in nine years.

Last year's biggest price increase was at the Arts Centre where a pint of John Smith's Magnet rose by 35p to £1.95 and a pint of Old Speckled Hen to £2.20.

The Arts Centre is run by Darlington's Labour-controlled borough council.

....and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what has six legs, bites and talks in code.

A morse-quito, of course.