Very far fom A1

MOTORWAY service stations have become a national institution in the way that Bedlam used to be. Visitors paid over the top there, too, and for a similarly dubious privilege.

Thus driven to distraction, as well a frequent traveller might be, former Scots Guards officer Hugh Cantlie has developed a diversionary tactic. His new guide - "Breaks near the Motorways" - suggests easy alternatives, up the junction and then some.

Mr Cantlie is a 75-year-old artist, lecturer and retired chartered surveyor who lives at Belford Hall in Northumberland. "The photograph makes people think I own the lot," he says. "In fact I've a one-up, one-down out the back."

The book's both "a personal crusade against bleak, impersonal motorway services offering mundane food at inflated prices" and an attempt to earn a few bob.

"Lloyd's wiped out my capital and Equitable Life wiped out my pension," he laments.

The additional suggestion that the opt-outs are within five minutes may not just be pushing it in one or two cases, but inviting a speeding summons, too - try reaching Sandhutton, near Thirsk, from the A1 - but going the extra mile seems entirely to be justified.

The non-motorway sections of the A1 are included partly because it's a bit hard to separate them but also because the Ministry of Transport (or whatever these days they're called) may one day fulfil its decades-long promise to upgrade in North Yorkshire, a pledge which may not be said to have been fast-tracked.

Still, things have been worse. Until 1963 the Great North Road didn't briskly bypass Boroughbridge, as now it does, but merely maunder through the middle. A couple of miles further on, memory suggests, the York to Harrogate railway line passed that way, too, the level crossing which blocked the principal artery a practical example of the North-South divide.

Whatever else the A1 was, it certainly wasn't very Great.

Boroughbridge is a pleasant, if not over-exciting little town in North Yorkshire where the River Tutt edges into the River Ure and where the principal attraction appears to be a fountain in St James' Square, built over an artesian well.

Without wishing to pour cold water, it's pretty ugly, like something out of Trumpton.

In its staging post heyday, the town had 22 pubs. Now the centre has just three, from which Mr Cantlie chooses the Black Bull - "Still just as warm and full of bustle as in the stagecoach days". It's a recommendation in which he is by no means alone.

A whole company of guides choruses the Bull's praises, from the Good Beer Guide ("a little gem") to something else which suggests that the pub is of the same size and layout as the Old Curiosity Shop. How they know that is, well, curious.

At any rate, we were disappointed from the moment they announced that the specials board by the door was so special that it couldn't even be ordered at lunchtime. What remained was prosaic - "mundane", the new guide might have said.

Around a tiny serving area with three hand pumps - nice pint of Timothy Taylor's bitter - are three convivial little rooms, the "snug" with a door so low that it might not just threatened head injuries to those over 6ft 2ins but a fractured sternum, too.

The affable barman looked so much like Alfred - the man who was butler to millionaire Bruce Wayne - that you almost expected him to pad up, cough discreetly, and announce that it was the Batphone.

The place is clearly popular, though finally we found a table out the back. From a limited lunchtime menu, plenty of hot and cold sandwiches, we ordered the hyperbolically "large" haddock (£9.95.)

It was fine, battered light golden and encased like a piscine pasty. The chips, however, were lukewarm and lugubrious, the salad limp and the little bowl of mushy peas so scadded to death in the microwave that it was impossible to eat them until the rest of the meal was over.

The driver of the family, bless her, ordered goujons of haddock again accompanied by chips so exceptionally unexceptional - more A689 than A1 - that nine-tenths went uneaten.

Jam sponge and custard (£3.95) had had the same recent experience as the mushy peas. It was OK.

It is not to diminish the book, nor sidetrack the usefulness of Mr Cantlie's research. A turn-off turn-on, nonetheless.

Breaks Near The Motorways, logically and helpfully laid out and informatively researched - even postcodes for satnav, and where to park the horse box - is published by Cheviot Books at £12.95. Eating Owt readers may have it for £9.95 if ordered within the next two weeks. Information and orders on www.cheviotbooks.com

SCOTCH Corner Little Chef, Friday 8.30am. Moto Radio, or whatever the in-house music machine is called, is playing Half Way to Paradise, a big sixties hit for Billy Fury.

"Don't leave me half way to paradise, so near yet so far away." It could have been written for the motorwayfarer.

We stand waiting for 15 minutes before being allocated a table. Radio Moto plays Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. "How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown..."

They sure know how to tap into the psyche.

The laminated menus are frayed with age, time consuming. The music machine plays Tears of a Clown. "I'm just trying to fool the public..."

For Little Chef, however, the most appropriate song of the Sixties may be one by The Mamas and The Papas, as amended by Hugh Cantlie. Mundane, mundane...

The troubled brand was launched in 1958 and appears thereafter barely to have moved along the gastronomic highway. It's time warped, fossilised and formulaic, locked-up in an age of drainpipe trousers and Bakelite radios.

The staff try valiantly, just two of them up-front, almost literally running the place. It reminds The Boss of the familiar quote about Friday evening coming round quite regularly but still always seeming to take British Railways by surprise.

Save that this is breakfast time, nothing seems to have changed there, either.

The Great British Breakfast is utterly unremarkable, OK-ish but half the price in a decent caff. The vegetarian option substitutes Linda McCartney sausages for the carnivorous sort, like this is somehow a big deal, and hash browns for bacon. The only sign of fruit in the place is a bottle of orange juice, £1.89. Vitamins, see?

It's all pretty heavy going before continuing along the A1. Hugh Cantlie's little volume seems ever more to fit like a glove compartment.

THE Boss, who has a gentler lifestyle, had just the previous day enjoyed a leisurely 10.30am breakfast at the incomparably excellent Black Bull in Frosterley - organic yoghurt and banana the very antithesis of Little Cheffield - and thus offers the opportunity to report that the Bull plans a real ale festival over the second weekend of August to mark the 150th anniversary of the railway up Weardale. Though the pub's barely two carriage-lengths away, there'll even be a bar on the platform. Much more of that later.

THE Darlington branch of CAMRA marks its 25th birthday - a hugely successful quarter-century - with a private party on Sunday afternoon at Number Twenty-2, the multi-award winning bar in Coniscliffe Road. There'll be at least 13 different real ales, considerably more than in the entire town in 1982, and for reasons entirely connected with Methodism, the column can't make it.

There's also a party this Thursday to mark the "new era" at the Scotch Corner Hotel, now marketed as "The hotel with a surprise inside". Just to be fair all round, we can't make that one, either.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew about the chap who existed solely on little bits of metal.

It was his staple diet, of course.