Bicycle kick

MR Norman Tebbitt, as then the old boy was, didn’t really advise the jobless to get on their bikes and look for work at all. Rather he recalled that that’s what his dad had done back in the Thirties, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Whether or not “Ian” is jobless is uncertain, but you wouldn’t bet the price of a pint against it.

Ian and his bike are recorded in the minutes of Maltby parish council, not for pumping money into the local economy, but for trying to do the opposite.

Usually he asks for £2, to help get him to Blackpool.

The gentleman, it is further observed, can get quite abusive if refused but (happily) is believed to be harmless.

Others may not be. The minutes, pinned to the village notice board, solemnly record other “fraudsters”

like the BT telephone bill scam and that a caravan has been stolen from Maltby Grange Farm.

Should anyone spot a bike towing a caravan westwards over Bowes Moor, they are asked to contact Cleveland police immediately.

It’s all part of a beggar-my-neighbour society, isn’t it? These days it’s hardly possible to take an evening walk through Darlington, as doubtless elsewhere, without being accosted for “change”, usually for the bus fare home.

The demand these days is to “spare”. It used to be “lend”, perhaps as in the phrase “take a lend of”, formerly employed by Yorkshire comedians, and possibly by Ms Hilda Baker.

Though tempting on such occasions to quote Polonius’s famed advice in Hamlet – “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend” – it was unlikely to have been appreciated.

More effective, sadly, is to tell them to bugger off.

MALTBY’S on Teesside, just south of Thornaby, a pleasant and probably quite affluent little village with a pub, shop, village hall, livery stables and what may be the smallest Methodist church in Christendom.

Until last year the end-of-terrace pub was called the Pathfinders, named after RAF crews who flew from nearby Thornaby airfield.

Now it’s Chadwicks Inn, no evident apostrophe, run by David Brownless – former head chef at Chadwicks in nearby Yarm – and by former Middlesbrough and Darlington footballer Gary Gill and his wife, Helen.

The parish council minutes – note to aspirant journos, always read the notice boards – seek to correct their earlier claim that Gary’s wife is called Carol and his business partner David Brown.

Though Pathfinders photographs still hang in the foyer – the very least, perhaps, that they could do – the place has been transformed.

A first impression – definition of a cushion, someone who bears the impression of the person who last sat on him – was therefore both worrying and misleading.

The dining chair sagged uniquely, a real bones-of-the-backside job as those seeking loose change might suppose. A replacement was cheerfully allowed.

It was Sunday lunchtime, our booking for 1pm, the place rapidly filling. Chiefly they were families.

There seemed, indeed, to be more Moses baskets than the mother and baby clinic at the Israelite General Hospital.

All were impeccably behaved, for babies. Inevitably there was a certain hubbub – what clever folk call ambient noise – making the music machine even more unnecessary.

If they must persist with the wretched things, I shall have to invent a sort of thermostat – The Boss thought it could be called a grumpyoldsodometer – which would cut in when other noise reached a certain level. Say 1.5 decibels.

Main course is £11.95 – “roast grand reserve” rump of beef, pork, chicken or halibut – two courses £14.95, three £17.95. A pint of Timothy Taylor’s admirable Landlord bitter, expertly kept, was £3.10. We said it was quite an affluent village.

The potato, bacon and thyme soup was smoothly blended, and came with good crusty bread, but might have taken a period of intense concentration to discern the second and third ingredients.

The Boss began with a seafood salad – little heaps of crayfish, tuna and herring with bits of greenery – which she thought perfect. It came on something a bit like – exactly like – one of those “rustic” house nameplates you see outside country stores.

Josiah Wedgwood (or someone) hadn’t invented pottery, she supposed, for food to be served on bits of wood. They’d probably agree in Stoke-on-Trent.

She followed with the halibut with spinach and a sauce of cream, tomatoes and things forgotten. I had the pork, sourced from the very farm from which someone had pinched the caravan.

This was top class, thoroughly in the pink, great crackling, attractively presented. The Yorkshire pudding was fresh, the buttered carrots impeccable, the duck fat-roasted potatoes seductive.

Four puddings embraced strawberry cheesecake, sticky toffee, lemon possett – on another bit of wood, perhaps a signature dish – and a generous and wholly delicious creme brulee with a couple of bits of shortbread baked in.

Efficient service is by black-clad young ladies, like the Chadwicks of old. Coffee’s an additional £2.35, each.

All in all it was a very good lunch, so good that it might beg the question of how the same columnist’s had this itinerant number all these years and whether it may not be someone else’s turn.

The answer has three words. The third of them is bike.

■ Chadwicks Inn, Maltby, Middlesbrough TS8 0BG.

Telephone 01642-590300. Twocourse set lunch £11.95, three courses £14.95. Early bird menu from 5pm. Dinner main courses around £16, exclusive of side orders. No problem for the disabled.

NOW owned by local businessman Bob Fountain, the Black Horse at Red Row, near Beamish, has reopened after a major facelift – “a modern interpretation of a traditional classic interior,” they say. The pub has a two-acre garden and orchard from which much of its produce will come. Food noon-10pm.

WE didn’t ask for limericks about Battersby Junction, but they arrived, anyway. Tom Teesdale’s was unprintable, Malcolm Lofthouse rhymes “junction” with “compunction”

but not as a limerick – he’d once ended at the railway station after straying off the Lyke Wake Walk, which only leaves Martin Wood’s three efforts. The best may be:

The porter at Battersby Junction

Announced with a grand air of unction

“If this train is on time

On this wonderful line

We must have a major malfunction.”

THE new Michelin Guide is out, about which much more next week. From the Oak Tree at Hutton Magna, a call to report that, first impressions notwithstanding, they’ve retained their “bib gourmand”

accolade. Clearly Michelin consider Hutton Magna to be pretty minor. They’ve listed it under Barnard Castle, instead (and blame the computer, of course).

AN email from Martin Donbavand wistfully recalls “old” drinks like a pint of half-and-half and a Robbie Mac (whisky and ginger.) A gang of them, he says, were recalling Johnny Pino but are unable to remember what was in it. Anyone know?

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you feed an invisible cat.

Evaporated milk, of course.