Suncatchers Cafe, Masham, North Yorkshire

The Darlington & Stockton Times still carried an almost affectionate piece on it two Fridays ago – “the happy knack of thriving almost everywhere” – which perchance was the day that a trio of us pitched up at Suncatchers Café in a cloudy corner of Masham, North Yorkshire.

The name’s brave, the day wasn’t.

All three warmed on the roast tomato and garlic soup though only one, Daddy Bear, paid £3.50 for a very large bowl indeed. Standard’s £2.95.

Wild? Unequivocally. It was everything that could have been wanted.

Terrific soup; good bread, too.

Owned by a Glaswegian called Colin Blair, who also has an outside catering company called Johnny Baghdad’s, the café is said on its website to have a “unique ambient atmosphere”

– don’t ask me – and to offer “world food”.

The paninis are Italian, the falafel originally south Asian, the pastries Danish, the waffles Belgian, the speciality nights usually Moroccan but occasionally Indian. Cosmopolitan coffee, too – and even a coal fire, if needed.

The whole thing could be termed eclectic, idiosyncratic, jolly, inexpensive – jolly inexpensive, even – and several other things, but the word which would most aptly have summed it, had not it been hijacked for other purposes, is gay. “Funky”, says Colin.

All sorts streams from the ceilings, like a Christmas childhood.

Coloured cloth squares are reminiscent of those lines of flags with which ships used to signal the football results, or something.

Between us we thoroughly enjoyed a spicy bean burger, a sticky chicken, mozzarella and tomato panini and, for the Englishman abroad, an egg and bacon roll. He asked for HP, if not for credit, made patterns with the pourer.

Accompanying salad is carefully dressed and properly presented, not the usual skimpy stuff that would barely cover Eve’s embarrassment.

The trio saw off two courses for £23, the lot.

Yet more hearth warming, the couple on the next table were discussing the joys of Shildon. World food, maybe, but verily home from home.

■ Suncatchers, Market Place, Masham, North Yorkshire. Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 30am-5pm.

Children’s sandwiches £2.25, including crisps or salad and fresh orange or apple juice.

suncatcherscafe.com THIS time last year we noted that the Good Food Guide’s “North- East” restaurant of the year, based on reader recommendations, was the Weaver’s Shed at Golcar – apparently pronounced Goker – west of Huddersfield. This year’s North-East champion, just announced, is the “eminently civilised” Yorke Arms at Ramsgill, the GFG’s 2007 restaurant of the year. Ramsgill’s in Nidderdale, north-west of Harrogate. At least it’s getting nearer.

ONE of the north country’s greatest characters is to be remembered – somewhat improbably for a Methodist local preacher – with a beer brewed specially in his honour.

Evidence that man shall not live by bread and cheese alone, Kit Calvert ale will be sold by the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes. It’s being made by the Wensleydale Brewery, a bit further down dale.

“We’re planning an official launch shortly,” says Sandra Bell at the Creamery.

Kit was 80 when he died in 1984, the hearse pulled by Dolly, his favourite pony. Whether he took a drop is unknown, though he was almost inseparable from his clay pipe.

Kit had led the fight to save the now-burgeoning cheese making business, then owned by Express Dairies, in 1935. It became a farmers’ co-operative, he the managing director, though he was famed equally for his work preserving the Wensleydale dialect and for his wondrous little second-hand bookshop in Hawes.

Universally it was known as the House of Commons, supposedly because of the amount of hot air spouted there, a semi-circle of battered chairs representing Hawes’ front bench. Unlike the Palace of Westminster, it had an honesty box.

“Sometimes I’ll open up and then not come back again for two or three days,” he told one or other of these columns back in 1976.

“No one ever takes anything much, they’re all honest around here. The trouble is, they don’t buy much, either.”

Among his most regular customers – visitors, anyway – was Arkengarthdale councillor Bill Alderson, known thereabouts as Bill Upsteps to differentiate him from a different Bill Alderson, who lived at ground level.

Someone once addressed a letter to “Bill Upsteps, Richmond, England”.

The post office delivered it two days later to his remote cottage.

Kit, at any rate, is still remembered with huge affection, not least in a dialect poem called Somebody Special.

He preyches on’t first day o’t week An’ practises on t’others.

All on us, rich an’ poor alike, To him is men an’ brothers.

“Whoivver can it be?” ye say, Nay, have a bit o’ wit; Who could it be but t’lad fra Haas, Oor one an’ only Kit.

WITH only a tenuous link to his last appearance in these columns – September 2006 – Brian Jones in Darlington rings following last week’s enthusiastic piece on the Board Inn at Lealholm, on the North Yorkshire moors.

Board and lodging, we’d mentioned other features of that most attractive village but not, as Brian points out, the roadside memorial to two US Air Force crew killed at Lealholm on the morning of April 27, 1979.

Major Donald Schuyler and Lt Thomas Wheeler were flying a Phantom jet from the USAF base at Alconbury when it appeared to develop engine trouble over the moors.

As the stricken plane plunged towards the earth, Lealholm and its 55- pupil school – starting another day – lay directly beneath. The two decided to stay with their plane.

Incredibly – “near miraculously”

says one of the websites – they narrowly missed school and village, ploughing into fields nearby.

Though the crew died and rather a lot of sheep were also killed, none in Lealholm was harmed. The crash site extended to half-a-mile.

The Echo’s front page headline the following day neatly summed events: “A village prays its thanks”.

The story was written, by rather sombre coincidence, by our East Cleveland reporter Ian Nelson, himself a wartime flight lieutenant, whose funeral was held last Friday.

■ Brian Jones was an RAF squadron leader, last featured after a meeting of the North-East branch of the Canal Zoners – veterans of the 1950s conflict around Suez. He still taps his shoes every morning – “force of habit” – to ensure that no scorpions have taken up overnight residence.

THE Lealholm piece also noted that, though tiny, the village had three churches – Roman Catholic, Methodist and Anglican, “the latter dedicated to St James the Greater”. It earns a rebuke, gentle but justified, from Paul Cockrill, also in Darlington. “Latter,” as Paul points out, means the secondmentioned of two. It should have been “last”. Since we’d docked the Board Inn at Lealholm half a mark for misspelling “rubarb”, Paul deducts a salutary full point.

Truly a latter-day sinner.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew why the orange went to the doctor.

Because it wasn’t peeling well.