Fare comment

US poor provincials, as insular as we are ungrammatical, like to suppose that the national press rarely leave London.

Certainly most of the restaurant critics don’t. Recent national exposure, however, has suggested an unprecedented yen for travel.

Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph had been to a wedding in Durham, went to King’s Cross to book a standard class advance ticket and was quoted £160, reduced to £134 since she was travelling at the weekend.

“The colour drained from my face,”

she wrote. Clearly the lady doesn’t get out much.

Ms Gordon was further aggrieved by overcrowding so severe on the return journey that she was unable even to force a way through to the buffet car – “should you wish to pay almost £5 for a sandwich you would think twice about feeding to a battery hen.”

Clearly, however, she had a cheap day return compared to Robert Crampton in The Times. Sent to visit North-East factories, he made the mistake of buying a ticket on the day – down on the 7am from King’s Cross, back on the 4.26pm from Darlington.

Standard – sub-standard – class, it cost £255.

“Surely National Express should go the whole hog and issue their ticket inspectors with masks, tricorn hats and pistols stuck in a jolly cummerbund?”

he wrote. “Daylight robbery for sure, and I would have thought a fairly large barrier to regeneration in the North-East.”

Last week’s column reflected similar dissatisfaction, albeit caused by travelling football morons.

It remains the case, whatever the circumstances, that train travel – especially on the East Coast main line – has rarely been more of an ordeal since the distant days when cattle and third-class passengers travelled in the same vehicles. These days it’s hard to tell the difference.

BENEATH the headline “Easter chaos to send 10m off the rails”, last Thursday’s Telegraph reported that just three rail companies wouldn’t suffer disruption because of engineering work over the holiday. They were Eurostar, the Stansted Express and the Island Line – eight-and-ahalf miles on the Isle of Wight.

STILL with public transport, few local issues in memory have commanded greater letters page attention than Durham County Council’s curious decision to take Durham’s park-and-ride contract from local firm Scarlet Band and award it to the Arriva conglomerate.

What’s especially curious is that Scarlet Band submitted the lowest tender.

I was reminded of all this on Good Friday, having walked in a downpour along the old mineral railway from Waterhouses to Stanley Hill Top before finally catching a bus at Billy Row.

Just a week ago on the opposite page, the lady of this house had extolled the pleasure of that walk. Well she might, the sun was shining. This time the only person I encountered was an elderly chap on a mobility scooter.

“We’re ganna get drunded,” he said, not unreasonably.

The No 1 bus from Tow Law to Darlington has been operated since the days of solid rubber tyres by United/ Arriva. On Sundays, evenings and bank holidays, however, the section between Tow law and Crook is now served by JSB Coaches from Barnard Castle and it was they who pulled up at Billy Row.

Cheerfully the driver welcome aboard the drunded rat, indicated that he could issue through tickets to Darlington and that at £4.20 it was 60p cheaper than the Arriva fare, though Arriva still covered most of the journey.

The next morning I caught the No 1 from Darlington to Crook, two miles this side of Billy Row. The fare was £4.40. To Billy Row it would indeed have been £4.80.

If the new Durham County Council wants to get off to a good start, shouldn’t they be thinking about making JSB the No 1 – and about promptly re-instating Scarlet Band, too?

WATERHOUSES, in the Deerness Valley about eight miles west of Durham, is the home of Esh Winning Football Club.

The Deerness Valley really is County Durham’s great and unspoiled secret, Esh Winning FC – as our photograph shows – perhaps the most scenically situated in the land.

If any wants to argue, they’ll have to provide photographic evidence, too.

BACK to Robert Crampton of The Times, who – between trains – had noticed on a visit to the Nissan factory in Washington a sign headed “Policy statement” which read: “Maximise staff engagement Through Nissan Way Mindsets and Actions Using Benchmarking To Achieve best of best QCTP.” Driven to distraction, not even the top people’s paper had any idea what to make of that one.

THE column gets about a bit, too, of course. Last Thursday evening by train, Metro and taxi to a dinner at the Village Hotel, Cobalt Village, North Shields.

However bucolic it may sound, and be intended to sound, the Village Hotel is the approximate size of Newton Aycliffe. Cobalt Village is what used to be called an industrial estate and is now a looking-for-business park.

It was a football dinner and it kicked off late – partly because of the hotel’s unlucky-for-some policy of not having a Table 13. Some say that the superstition dates back to Alexander the Great who, not content with statues to the 12 gods, erected a 13th of himself and died soon afterwards.

Others suppose it to come from the Last Supper, at which 13 people were present, or that Christ was crucified not just on a Friday but (so it’s said) Friday the 13th.

Martin Birtle, meanwhile, reports that on the fence outside the graveyard in Trimdon a large red notice warns “Danger, keep out”. Failure to do so may be considered unlucky, too.

STILL tunnelling its way through the great snowstorm of late-March 1968, last week’s column scratched its head somewhat over why the Officials’ Club at Easington Colliery should be known as the Leather Cap.

Mary Bell – Easington lass, now down the road in Horden – explains that in the days before miners’ helmets, the gaffers had leather headgear, a bit like bobble hats, and the workers simply wore their flat caps.

Thanks for all the other recollections of that white-out weekend. It’s probably time the snow stopped.

IT’S impossible to think of flat caps without recalling the late Ernest Armstrong – MP for North West Durham, good Methodist and football man.

Though the cheeriest of characters, Ernest appeared only to know one joke – the one about the two miners watching Sunderland play football in the days when the Roker End was uncovered, “Have ye not browt yer cap?” asks one of the other.

“Why aye, man, it’s in me top coat pocket,” says his mate.

“So what are ye not wearing it for?”

“Ye divvent think aa’m ganna sit all neet at home in a wet cap, do ye?”