Wolf at the door

MAYBE because there were only 60-odd shopping days to Christmas, maybe because somewhere in the distance that bloke was singing about stopping the cavalry, three of the four of us had the turkey. What folk call a turkey dinner.

I had the pork. The pork was better than the beer – faint praise may be as good as this is going to get – though if a corrugated cardboard label identifying the meat had been stuck to its side, it might have been possible to have eaten both without discerning the difference.

The Shepherd and Shepherdess is near the entrance to Beamish Museum in north Durham. We only ate there because the first choice – the reborn Beamish Mary at No Place, a mile to the south – hadn’t then started Sunday lunches.

We’d been invited to the Beamish Mary’s reopening two days earlier, opted instead to play a sort of retrospective Third Little Pig, could have gone hungry, nonetheless.

The Shepherd and Shepherdess was a Vaux pub, still looks like one, may have changed little over the years. It was well filled, clearly popular.

The pork had been processed, possibly sliced, somewhere else. So had a large and lugubrious wodge of stuffing.

The Yorkshire pudding was barely warm and had the consistency of a well-used face flannel. The veg weren’t bad if you like watery vegetables. The others weren’t voting for the turkey, either.

The beer, appropriately, was Black Sheep. It’s normally fine but this was just strange – flat, warm, bitter only in the sense of disappointment. None asked how the meal had been, presumably having read the body language.

Afterwards we had one in the Beamish Mary. No matter that their own telephone number was wrong on the website, no matter that none behind the bar knew who’d brewed “the “Beamish Mary Lamp Lighter”, it was wholly different.

There were four hand pumps, a large and aromatic log fire, big old-fashioned tables, a lively buzz. The old place is impressively spruced up without losing a jot of its congenial character, the menu – now up and running – offering mainly straightforward dishes from locally-sourced ingredients.

Owner Jeff Hind reckons that many of the vegetables are grown on the allotments out the back. Some may come from as far off as Stanley. It all invites a tagline about No Place like home.

Jeff’s parents had pubs all over the North-East; he himself now owns five, including the White Swan at Stokesley and the Grey Horse at Consett – both brew pubs.

It’s Consett which makes Lamp Lighter. Someone should be told.

There’s a real and crucial dilemma here, however, a dilemma that’s existed throughout all these years of the Eating Owt column and which is likely to worry away until, like Shepherd and Shepherdess, we’re put out to grass.

Others clearly like the place, doubtless would argue that it’s also just like you’d get at home, that the Shepherd and Shepherdess offers a safe fold from the week’s labours and from a vexing world.

In every sense it’s a matter of taste, of where you feel comfortable. Even now I wonder who am I to cry wolf?

REPORTING two weeks ago from the Kings Arms at Sandhutton – between Northallerton and Thirsk – we observed that, framed on the wall, was a 1964 lunch bill for 12 people. Three courses, six shillings apiece.

Not only were Vera and Henry Dyson among the diners, the meal marked the baptism of their son in the village Methodist chapel.

“Before that occasion, babies were baptised from a basin taken from the caretaker’s house,” they recall. “To celebrate the event, we bought a font for the chapel.”

Mr and Mrs Dyson are now in Romanby, Northallerton. Would the Kings Arms, they wonder, be prepared to give them a six bob lunch now?

MR Charlie Donaghy, sage of Tow Law, stands dinner at the North Point Hotel – recently refurbished, remarkably inexpensive, going well.

In Charlie’s childhood, apparently, it was called The Big Inn, which should not be confused with the Big Yin.

That’s Billy Connolly.

Talk turns also to the hammer-andtongs days, the ironworks days, when it’s reckoned that the windy west Durham town had 47 licensed premises.

Now there are 40-odd fewer, though the former working men’s club was about to reopen as a pub.

Extensively and expensively restored by local building brothers Tony and Michael Urwin, it’ll be called Club X – ex-club, see – though it’s hoped that the games end will separately be CIUaffiliated.

Tony looked in, promised that they’d even be doing bingo for the old folk, though it was unclear whether bingo meets the CIU definition of a game. Out the back, they’ll run a place called Bistro Nosh; dear old Tow Law may be on the up.

At the North Point, a large and piping- hot bowl of French onion soup was just £2. The top was effectively cheese on toast, the soup thick and rich – perfect for a Tow Law autumn evening.

A prodigious steak, mushroom and ale pudding and what Charlie reckoned the biggest gammon steak he’d ever eaten together added £13 to the bill. They came with a huge bowl of potatoes and vegetables, another of good chips. Puddings, had it been possible to approach them, would have added another £2 apiece.

Charlie, great lad, had just started a sponsored slim to raise money for a “secret garden” at the local primary school. He’s a heavyweight champion and he’ll hit his target, but since North Point is clearly a magnet for the ravenous, it was an improbable beginning.

IF not quite wishing that every one were a Winner, some of us are very fond of Michael Winner’s idiosyncratic restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times – not least because he’s not so immured in the towers of London as most national critics.

As his latest volume confirms, however, North-East forays are few and finicky. “Exceptionally nice people, the Northerners, but no idea about clothes, buildings, hairstyles, anything,”

he wrote when reviewing Jesmond Dene House, in Newcastle.

He thought Slaley Hall, near Hexham, a “disaster”, fared worse still at the nearby Langley Castle, ate before addressing the Durham University Union at the Almshouses on Palace Green – “one of the major sights of the world” – and conversely found it “most acceptable”.

The Royal County Hotel (or whatever these days it’s called) was less successful.

“The breakfast came on time but was pretty awful.”

Particularly he liked the Harbour Bar, a Scarborough period piece. “The best ice cream I ever had.”

The taste agreeable if acquired, this one (JR Books, £16.99) embraces 600 places here and abroad. Calm Down, Dear may be next.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew how you get down from an elephant. You don’t. Down comes from a duck.