IN the Victoria in Durham - that most glorious, most embracing and most unchanging of pubs - they're not just mourning Arthur Bell but have had a beer brewed in his memory.

Arthur was a regular, fitted like a glove, so much part of the place that, like one or two more, he had his own keys.

"If he couldn't sleep he'd toddle down at two in the morning," recalls Michael Webster, the magnificent landlord. "I'd open up and there'd be an IOU on the till. Arthur was just lovely."

They'd even given him a little name badge - "Assistant manager", it said - and had his photograph, shrouded in pipe smoke, on the wall. It's what pubs used to be like.

Arthur, a retired Durham prison officer, died suddenly two weeks ago, aged 77. Michael immediately rang the Tyneside based Big Lamp Brewery to ask for something with which to toast his memory.

Last Wednesday, when the column looked in, they were already testing Old Arthur, described on the pump clip as "light and fruity" - just like Arthur, said Michael, but it had hidden 4.2 strength, too.

"That was Arthur," said Michael. "Not many people knew he was a judo black belt."

His funeral was last Friday at St Oswald's, 200 yards along the road. The mourners left from the Vic, the cortege passed the Vic, the wake returned to the Vic.

It was what he would have wanted, said Michael, and what the pub wanted, too. They blessed his memory repeatedly. Old Arthur would have loved it.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's soft and yellow and goes round and round.

A long-playing omelette, of course.