For the way we live

Readers will nonetheless be delighted to learn that this week's three-course offering is not only altogether more populist but pokes around the bargain basement, in the hope of discovering something long forgotten.

The company's chief accountant, who without troubles to seek also supports Middlesbrough FC, will no doubt be equally appreciative.

The Gretna Green Inn sits alongside the A167 at Newton Aycliffe, but in one of its many previous incarnations - as the Gretna Green Wedding Inn - was there when the new town was barely a twinkle in the nuptial eye.

These columns may have wondered previously why a totem of tawdry tartan tourism was recreated in Co Durham, but if there was an answer, we've forgotten it. It was not, at any rate, a case of love at first sight.

The pub's enormous, and for a Tuesday evening in November, very well patronised - chiefly, perhaps, because of a "Two-for-one" offer massively promoted but available (as more modest detail confirms) only on main courses.

"Two-for-one" also applies for Christmas Day lunch, £50 the pair.

There were fruit machines and chute machines and another called a Mini-Sports Arena; there were teenagers texting, older folk anticipating the works Christmas party, a little lad of five or so announcing to his parents that he had a new girlfriend.

"I'm sucking her blood," he said. They smiled, indulgently.

Flashing blue lights outside indicated that the police had closed the road because of a major incident. Time was we'd have been inquisitively outside, notebook erect, demanding chapter and worse.

This time we found a mobile telephone and inostentatiously rang the newsdesk. The front page reluctantly held its breath.

The chain food is probably much the same in Aycliffe or Auchtermuchty, but it had its moments for all that. The beer is standard, which is to say, bog standard. "Combo for one" (£3.25) was a perfectly decent plate of deep fried this and that, "mushroom bacon bruschetta" - bruschetta is a fanciful caterers' word, meaning toast - had plenty of flavour, too.

Our two main courses, £7.95 together, were seafood platter - plattering to deceive, unfortunately - and jambalaya, a sort of chicken and spicy sausage risotto, which in moistness, texture and flavour couldn't be faulted.

Wasn't there a song called Jambalaya? Son of a gun, have some fun, jambalaya?

The chips were awful, lukewarm cardboard cut-outs that faced arrest for attempting to impersonate a potato. Dud spuds, if ever.

Other main courses from the "two-for-one" list included sweet and sour chicken, fish and chips, lasagne and steak and ale pie.

Between us, we finished with an "apple and blackberry squidgy" with custard - one eating with the spoon, the other the fork. "You can't eat custard with a fork," protested The Boss, and was at once proved to be mistaken.

On the next table a chap was having a row with a waitress over the "Two-for-one" terms as they applied, or didn't, to liqueur coffees. "We'll away home and open the Jamieson's," he finally conceded.

"You won't," said the lady of the house, "that's for Christmas."

He left disgruntled, promising to contact Mike Amos. The waitress shrugged. As someone may almost have observed earlier, a pub for the way we live today.

IT MUST be 25 years since we attended the opening of the Kingfisher in Spennymoor, a pub considered so smart that customers were asked to take off their shoes, lest they made a mess of the new carpet.

The old bird, it must be said, had been looking pretty peaky since then. There were times - it is an old joke - when it might have been more advisable to wipe the feet on the way out.

Now, at last, it is again taking wing. Peter Graham, a Scot who came from the Robbie Burns in Houghton-le-Spring, has not only increased turnover by 400 per cent in the six months he's been there but is regional winner of the pub group's "Newcomer of the year" award.

"It just needed a bit of looking after," he says. That and a couple of good doormen at night.

We went with the boys from Spennymoor Boxing Academy, embarking today on a trip to Chicago, though the incorrigible Hodgy was distinctly out of fettle. "I've had this 24-hour flu for six weeks," he said, and if he hadn't had 20 years on the dole, he'd have had to sign off sick.

They'd also just emailed their American hosts to ask what kind of night life might best suit a bunch of British boxers at large in the Windy City. "We've a wonderful production of "A Christmas Carol," they replied.

"It's not quite what we had in mind," said Hodgy.

Spennymoor, it might fairly be said, is a no-frills sort of a town. What it needed - and, remarkably, lacked - was a pub serving no frills, honest, great value, in-your-face English grub. The Kingfisher at last obliges.

Main courses from the blackboard - all-day breakfast, braised steak or chicken curry, perhaps - can be either small (£2.50), medium (£3) or large, which means gargantuan, for £4.25. Puddings, no less immodest, are included in the price.

A large all-day breakfast came with about half a stone of very good bacon, four hash browns, three sausages, two fried eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and other things forgotten in the excitement.

Hodgy, poor lad, had an omelette and an orange and water. He couldn't even blame the beer.

Since Peter and Marion Graham also sponsor one of the boxers, it wouldn't do to bite the hand that feeds them, but of its kind this was tremendous. The Kingfisher, warmly recommended, also has a limited "two-for-one" deal that includes sirloin steak and all the trimmings with a bottle of house wine for £9.99 the lot. They can't, of course, do two Christmas Day lunches for £50. At the Kingfisher it's £25 apiece.

STILL around Spennymoor, a PS to the piece a couple of weeks ago about the former vineyard at the Whitworth Hall Hotel. No wine, alas, but David Hirst reckons that his late mother's greenhouse vine at East Boldon - north of Sunderland - this year produced more grapes than ever. "My father is now too old to make the home-made so the grapes are simply nibbled until boredom or surfeit set in."

Perhaps, suggests David, small-time grape growers in the North-East could form a co-operative winery. "Degustation ici signs could be placed alongside the A1(M) for Durham Red Biddy or Cote de Wear, or Vin de pays d'Ox."

'Last orders 2pm," it said at The Dining Room in Boroughbridge, newly recommended in the Good Food Guide, but it was 1.50pm and all appeared to have gone home.

Instead, we biffed up North to the dear old Nags Head at Pickhill, a mile east of the A1 near Thirsk - warmed by the fire, cheered by a pint of Hambleton, assured that since they were a true inn they would serve something simple at any reasonable hour.

Soup might have been Stilton and black bean or leek and potato, sandwiches all sorts of things. Customers able to talk horse-racing with Edward Boynton, the besotted co-owner, might feel even more at home.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what kind of crisps are named after an Arab ruler. Sultan vinegar, of course.

Published: Tuesday, November 27, 2001