Vive la difference

Until the 8.15am from Darlington to Kings Cross - calling at York, Doncaster, Retford, Newark, Grantham, Peterborough and probably the driver's old aunty's if she wanted a pint of milk dropping off - it must have been 30 years since we'd been spoon fed Scotland's oat cuisine. It didn't seem to have changed much.

The GNER breakfast is £13 these days, an additional £24.95 for those who prefer champagne with their Sugar Puffs. Though we went first class, rare indulgence, you could still tell the Shildon lads because they were the ones eating hash browns with their fingers.

On the next table, a chap was trying to spell "etiquette" into his Dictaphone, which also seemed to defeat the object somewhat.

The railway breakfast remains an early favourite, served by a cheery Geordie crew and said to include "crafted" regional specialities.

Perhaps they should have a barter system, however, foregoing the fried egg, say - eggs is eggs - for an extra sausage. The sausages are excellent.

The breakfast ended somewhere over the Selby coalfield, the journey was just beginning. We were tunnelling by Eurostar to Paris.

THAT was first class, too, 12.53 from Waterloo and with complimentary up market magazines like Newsweek and The Economist. There's was also something called Men's Health, with article likes "Sculpt your abs in 28 days" and "Get what you want in bed."

What, the Oor Wullie annual?

Though the train was barely a third full, we still managed the carriage with the wowly bairn. Bairns wowl bilingually, and this was the original enfant terrible.

On the next table there was an American holding mobile phone conversations in German and tapping slow and staccato on a keyboard, like Blind Pew on a laptop.

As the Famous Five would have done, we concluded that he was a spy.

The ticket price included a three course meal, with wine - "seasonal dishes with a regional twist," it said - which on the outward journey included, pear, Stilton and walnut salad, a mushroom pasta thing with a "provencale tomato and parmesan sauce" or plaice in a lobster and chive sauce and sticky toffee pudding.

It's airline food, basically - the starter OK, the pasta glutinous and the pudding resembling suede shoe leather in both appearance and (probably) taste.

That was the difference with the airlines. "On planes, the pudding's always a square pink blob," said The Boss. This was a square brown blob.

The journey - comfortable, commodious, first classy - would have taken just under three hours had not the French train manager announced delays as we passed Calais. He blamed the Brits, of course.

IN 1814, it is said, Russian Cossacks dining at Maison Catherine in Paris's arty Montmarte district grew impatient at the speed of service, banged the tables and shouted "Bistro, bistro" - a Slavonic term meaning "Finger out, garcon, if you please" which lost little in the translation.

Thus Maison Catherine became France's first fast food joint; the bistro - not many people know this - was born.

Paris now has bistros, brasseries, even sandwicheries, on every corner. There are almost as many pharmacies, most of them majoring in pile cream.

The notion that French food is somehow superior seems wholly mistaken, however. Over four days, we didn't have a decent meal, much less a good one.

Menus were predictable and unimaginative, flavours bland, steaks grizzly, enthusiasm minimal and prices no more competitive than at home - a view shared by Philip Delves Broughton, the Daily Telegraph's Paris correspondent.

Most Parisian eating places were just awful, he wrote in July - "stalled on the hard shoulder of international cuisine like a clapped out Renault."

Cry xenophobe if you wish, spell it if you can, suggest mountains out of moules hills, but it was time to go back to our roots.

THE international edition of the New York Herald Tribune had forecast that the weather in western Europe would be unusually cold and wet. Since it was chiefly both sunny and touching 60 degrees, it may help explain why the Tribune doesn't sell many copies in Newton Aycliffe.

On the Wednesday afternoon it bucketed down, however. We took shelter in the Frog and Rosbif, one of many English (and Irish) pubs in the French capital.

There's also the Financier and Firkin, the Floozy and Firkin, the Bowler, the Bombardier and a place in the red light district which proclaimed Whitbread beer and promised "frolics". The frolics, it is to be hoped, are rather more to the column's taste than is the beer.

There are also three other "Frog" pubs, a term which may have originated in the Duke of Anjou's unrequited affection for Good Queen Bess.

Anjou was 21 or so, pock marked and bandy legged. Elizabeth - 48, allegedly inexperienced but probably not bandy legged - referred to him as "my little frog."

It may not have done much for the entente cordiale, nor for the marriage prospects either.

The Frog and Rosbif is the flagship, the tricoleur anglais, screens English sports fixtures, serves fish and chips, has barmaids with Leyton Orient accents and brews its own blessed real ale downstairs.

The beers have punning names like Inseine, Dark de Triomphe and Parislytic, cost about £3.60 a pint and are really rather nice.

The walls are hung with little English aphorisms - "Don't drink and drive, you might spill some" - and with cuttings from English language newspapers about the pub itself.

One's headed "Rugger buggers give French the willies" which reminded The Boss of a visit to an Amsterdam sweet shop with her mum.

The shop, a meltdown moment, sold chocolate willies. Her mum asked if they were what she feared they were and was told that it was so.

"Well," she said, "you don't get THOSE in Thornton's."

Perhaps the most vivid reminder of old England, however, is the phalnax of Heinz tomato ketchup bottles, lined blood red and up for it like our brave boys at Agincourt.

The roast beef in a ciabetta (damn the ubiquitous ciabatta) was a little insipid but otherwise fine, the smoked salmon with spinach and a poached egg lacked only in chips. Both were about £7.

They were garlic chips, Anglo-French and exquisite. After another two or three pints, mad dogs and English folk returned happily to the pouring rain.

BACK in Blighty, we headed North up the A1 in an absurdly optimistic attempt to maintain the French connection.

Delice de France, one of a fast lengthening chain of franchised outlets under that aegis, is part of a service area on the A1/A167 junction near Aycliffe Village.

It sells full English breakfast, Danish pastries, Cornish pasties and sandwiches, paninis, chicken tikka and mince and onion pies in an atmosphere akin to a transport cafZ in a petrol crisis.

The French accent is principally the ready-to-bake baguettes, though a tray of Kingsmill was being carted about by a chap who wore skin tight jodhpurs, riding boots and an equine cap and looked a bit like Captain Mark Phillips having forgotten where he'd left his horse.

The Boss thought he looked like the manager.

Decoration was principally a single row of Coca-Cola Christmas streamers and, more appealingly, a poster warning that those who smoked would be deemed to be on fire and appropriate action taken.

The Boss had a coronation chicken baguette, a dish created for the enthronement of Queen Elizabeth II (of England), we a bacon and mushroom baguette. The bread was passable, fillings fine, coffee - from a machine in the middle of the floor - served in polystyrene cups and akin to what Frenchmen reputedly add to the River Seine.

The experience was bizarre. Vive la France, vive la difference.

So finally, since this is a cross-Channel column, the bairns ventured the old joke about what a Frenchman has for breakfast.

Huit heures bix, of course.

Published: ??/??/2002