SAM Turner and Sons' website calls the store a "farmers' supermarket", and in the sense that externally it resembles a very large and rather grand barn - the approximate size of Rutlandshire - the description is at once appropriate.

Like many of the rest of us, farmers have need of roulette wheels, solar tulips, bird tables, inflatable swimming pools and boxes of dominoes - all beneath Sam's compendious roof - and also, happily, of a good breakfast.

It's where we came in, half past nine, up the stairs past the picture postcards and things.

Sam's, says the website, has been in Northallerton since 1931. Charlie Turner, the founder's great grandson, further explains that Sam came to North Yorkshire's county town when 50, mainly to trade from market stalls, with his own son.

There'd been a family farming business at Lazenby, in east Cleveland, but it had too many mouths to feed. Sam started two-handed; now - moved in the 1980s onto the Darlington Road - they employ 80.

Today's column is entirely North Yorkshire-based, though the recommendations - coincidentally - are all from what right thinking and historically-aware people still regard as the County of Durham, that is to say Billingham, Hartlepool and (less contentiously) Newton Aycliffe.

Anne Birtle in Billingham had had breakfast at Sam's, thought it as good a start to the day as she could remember, particularly enthused about the Yorkshire rarebit with onion marmalade.

The café's hung with the sort of pictures which doubtless adorn the average North Riding milking parlour, and with shots of old Sam. It's bright, bustling, friendly and has a rack near the entrance with the day's newspapers, some Yorkshire magazines and the Beano.

Twopence when we were bit bairns, the Beano is now 99p and has its own website, www.beanotown.co.uk

Dennis the Menace still terrorises weekly and with no sign of an Asbo, Bash Street school appears not yet to have been put into special measures, Little Plum - no longer Your Redskin Chum, or with a horse called Treaclefoot - has been transferred to something called Beano-Max where he gets to pow-wow with the Kaiser Chiefs.

They also remain fond of alliteration - Ronnie Rebel, Freddie Fear - so it's perhaps appropriate that two of the highlights of a cracking good breakfast were super sausages and terrific toast.

The other was the onion marmalade, or orgasmic onion marmalade as the alliteratists might prefer. Served with the rarebit, it should also adorn the all-day breakfast - no extra charge, of course, the greatest Yorkshire rarebit of all.

Already they were queuing for breakfast. Soon there was a second and rather younger queue: who was the old feller hogging the Beano?

The all-day was hot, locally sourced, full of what might be called proper farmyard flavours. That the toast was the highlight - thick, warm, crumbly, actually tasting of something - may in part have been because good toast is almost impossible to find.

The rarebit had cheese and bacon. "Delicious," the Boss considered.

The tea was described as "Yorkshire", the coffee - good, strong, plentiful - as "Italian". The bill reached about £12.

It was an extremely good start, and with just one possible problem. How are you going to keep them down on the farm, now they've found Sam Turner's?

PIE pundit Arthur Pickering loves Appleton's - they of the "table dainties" - in Ripon. We mentioned as much a couple of weeks back.

The shop's in the Market Place, has been for donkeys' years. Though the window display may little have changed - a limit to what can be done with several dozen pastries - Riponians still press their noses against the glass, perming what to have for dinner.

Outside, there's a restored cab drivers' rest room - on wheels - and by the present taxi rank one of those clangorous telephones, opened with a key, which were used by Officer Dibble (or, more accurately, by Top Cat.)

A driver ran for the call. It stopped, as they do, the moment he put his hand on the receiver.

Arthur, the Hartlepool connection, is particularly taken with Appleton's plate-sized lattice pork pies - lovely pastry, probably best cold, filled to the brim with well-seasoned meat and thoroughly enjoyable.

Like the Beano, penny ducks have been seriously subject to inflation and with an almost identical index. At Appleton's, a penny duck is 45p - a perfectly good specimen but nowhere near as sumptuous or as surprising as the 37p critturs from Robinson's, in Wingate. That's in Co Durham, too.

THERE'S a graveyard, not a garden, out the back of the Queen Catherine in Osmotherley. First door's groom's, second tombs and though it's been there for centuries, locals still talk about nipping out to water their plot.

The graveyard separates the pub from St Peter's church, the parish magazine - no self-respecting journalist should ever be without the parish magazine - carrying a letter from an assistant curate, simply signed "George".

This proves to be the Rev Georgina Morley - George as in Famous Five - who's off to lecture in something called systematic theology at Durham.

Stan Dack, he of Newton Aycliffe, had been taken by the graveyard, the spicy tomato soup and the salmon. His mate liked the deep fried Brie and the sea bass.

Osmotherley's about eight miles east of Northallerton, on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors. Three good pubs and a café lie within a 50 yard radius of the old market cross, helping ensure that the village overflows in summer and that these days it may even look forward to a bit of peace and quiet.

Whether the pubs feel similarly is another matter altogether.

For years the Queen Cath was also the check-in for the 42-mile Lyke Wake Walk, a map on the wall serving as a reminder of that oft-fraught and ever-lugubrious crossing.

The pub's open-plan, lengthy bar, Tetley's Bitter and Thoroughbred, from the Hambleton Brewery, on hand pump. The menu, supplemented by specials boards, is cleverly constructed - lots of tortellinis, stir fries and salad bowls. Reasonably priced sandwiches and baguettes, too.

A familiar rubric advises that food is freshly prepared and urges patience. No mention is made of the staff - genial and welcoming but so laid-back as to be horizontal (as they might say of the denizens out the back).

The plea, at any rate, had failed to appease a rather swanky (and exceptionally tiresome) lady who, tired of waiting, instructed her poor husband to go to the bar and complain.

He, poor chap, returned with the pallid assurance that it wouldn't be long, was roundly informed that he had no balls - he was, he was - and substituted by the dragon who announced that they were leaving forthwith.

She was followed into the street by the barmaid, exasperated, and by her husband, emasculated.

The Boss had ordered the lobster, which may have taken up time in the kitchen, preceded by mussels in a well judged garlic and cream sauce. The black pudding and bacon, said to be locally sourced, came with cherry tomatoes and salad, the "Icelandic" cod (£7.50) was enormous, lightly and crisply battered and came with reasonable chips and mushy peas.

We wholly enjoyed it all, thought it well worth waiting for. As the systematic theologians might suppose of the good folk out the back, better late than never.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a midnight feast.

A bed spread, of course.