THE elder bairn was 21 last Wednesday. We celebrated at Don Bee's fish and chip caf in Seaton Carew. The bairn, lucky for some, celebrated on Ibiza.

Seaton Carew is a seaside suburb of Hartlepool; Ibiza's by the seaside in Spain. To a well bred, middle-aged lad from Shildon, it may be hard to discern the more dreadful.

Ibiza has vast clubs like El Divino, Privilege and Amnesia, which open at midnight and are tucked up when ordinary folk start their shift.

Seaton Carew has the Malibu Club, "available for all your private functions." The Boss thought they might like to rephrase that a bit.

Ibiza has tens of thousands of scantily dressed youngsters and a website for "Ibiza virgins", a condition thought strictly to be temporary. Seaton Carew has the Hartlepool Mail.

Ibiza has vomit all over the pavements. So has Seaton Carew.

Seaton, in truth, has some good new housing - names like Courageous Close, nautical but nice - a decent enough promenade and, unlike Ibiza, a good cricket club. It's the village centre, or whatever they call it, which drags seediness back to an altogether grubbier age.

It's simply called The Front, though not front as in vanguard. Rather it is front as in battlefront and every bit as desperate, cheerless and ultimately likely to do your head in.

If the battlefront metaphor may be continued, then John Betjeman's explosives lines from 1937....

Come kindly bombs and fall on Slough,

It isn't fit for humans now...

might be loaded into am aircraft hold and dropped onto the southern end of Seaton. A wrecking Carew, as it were, and few would notice the difference.

It was desolate, meretricious, misty and mucky, a place to weep for, and with. The curious thing is that Hartlepool itself has been so greatly and commendably improved, whilst its Cinderella neighbour has been left, as they say in these parts, fleeing in rags.

Krimo's restaurant, valiant once, is for sale while its owner lucratively relocates. The former Albert House restaurant is for sale, the Seaton Hotel is for sale, the Late Shop closed early.

The sea, despairing, has gone out somewhere.

The Longscar family pub had a beer garden without grass; the rose garden next to it was choked with lager cans.

In the shop across the road, a can of beer is 65p and a cider 50p. In Ibiza it's £10 or more for a vodka and lemon, £6 for a beer - or a water.

In the family pub we paid £1.50 for a pint of Roughwith, soda water free. It felt like the waiting room at a Co-op funeral cottage. "It's a good thing we're going on holiday on Friday, otherwise I think I'd slash my wrists," said The Boss.

A couple of lads rolled around on the pavement outside, a place for fresh air and fun fighting.

In Don Bee's, a simply furnished fish shop and caf, the waitress appeared to take the order within ten seconds of our arrival.

We asked for a minute. She wrote it down, as if asked for a minute with chips and salad.

There were no frills, no starters and no puddings. The fish and chips - and this may come as the biggest surprise since Commander Kerans won Hartlepool for the Conservatives in 1959 - were very good indeed.

Most set meals - bread and butter, vast bowls of mushy peas, tea or coffee, are £3.85, with 20 per cent off for the old folk. The boss, always expensive to keep, ordered the lemon sole. That was £4.

The batter was crisp and freshly cooked, likewise the half stone of excellent chips which overflowed each plate. The peas, miles above average, had to be brought in separately. Firm fish remained hot and moreish.

Poor Seaton Carew sea front fails in almost every direction. This, at least, was Bee-plus.

Last week's piece on Mcquays, by the river at Stockton, made reference to a lot of water flowing beneath Thornaby bridge and also to the area of Thornaby now confusingly called Teesdale.

The bridge, says Mr D J Mackintosh in Norton on Tees, is correctly the Victoria Bridge - "a common mistake locally" - whilst Teesdale probably takes its name from Head Wrightson's former Teesdale Works.

"I wonder how many Thornaby people know," he adds, "that their home town was once called South Stockton."

Someone rang, aghast, about what's happened to the Wheatsheaf in Darlington. Though by no means the column's cuppa, it wasn't as ghastly as all that.

We quite liked the carpet.

Long a traditional S&N pub in Yarm Road, it's been dragged into shiny 21st century Darlo. Screens of all sizes predominate, mercifully muted last Thursday lunchtime. You could be driven spare by the gaming machines instead.

Tables offer menus for both food and cocktail-type drinks - "Shooters" in modern parlance, apparently. A pitcher containing eight shots of vodka and four cans of Red Bull (£13.95) might therefore be followed - every pitcher tells a story - by the "Recovery breakfast", sub-titled "the perfect hangover cure."

The perfect way to avoid a hangover, of course, is to drink real ale and not that the gaseous stuff that, alone, is available here.

To start, three of us shared a "colossal combo" (£5.95) comprising garlic bread, buffalo wings, breaded mushrooms, bacon, tortillas chips and things but not a finger bowl, of which they seemed never to have heard.

Mr John Briggs had the recovery breakfast (£3.95), though there may be little medical evidence of its efficacy in such cases. Mrs Briggs, who is American, said that it was illegal to serve runny fried eggs in the States.

"You can sometimes get them under the counter," she added.

We two had cajun chicken and bacon salad, plenteous but substantially boring. Stook on the Wheatsheaf? Bring on the combine harvester.

IN the matter of fancy names for high faluting drinks, last week's column noted that "Sex on the Bus" was available - the drink, that is - at the new Lacuna Lodge caf/bar on Durham bus station. In a club a few days later we came across a cocktail called "Sex on the beach". The location of this seaside sensuality? Horden.

...and finally, the bairns (aforesaid) wondered if we knew what you get if you cross a centipede with a parrot.

A walkie-talkie, of course. The column returns in a fortnight.

Published: 10/09/2002