It's hard work but someone has to do it

They bought the first pint, handed out tokens for more ale, laid on a lovely buffet at Ye Olde Elm Tree.

Who says there’s no such thing as a free launch?

The guide’s the brainchild of the Durham branch of the Campaign for Real Ale, chiefly Bob Chapman and Nick Young. Nick’s a joiner, Bob a retired business analyst at Newcastle University. One of them talked about innovative strategies, interim working groups and collating data. The other got another pint down his neck.

It was also good to meet Nick’s wife, a teacher, who may be the only Camra life member who’s strictly teetotal. “I like the social side,” she said. “Besides, I make a very good driver home.”

Partly, the initiative was to try to persuade licensees to support local breweries, such as Hill Island, from Durham, who’d brewed a Real Ale Trail Ale. Alan Hogg, from the Yard of Ale brewery, Ferryhill Station, and Steve and Christine Gibbs ,from the Durham Brewery, Bowburn, were also in attendance.

Christine may be the only Camra member to have a cello called Francesca, and to love it like she loves a perfect pint. “She’s a gorgeous instrument,” she said.

The guide, funded by the Camra branch, was compiled after customers were found unanimously to want real ale and licensees to know little about what was on offer. “Former Scottish and Newcastle pubs failed most miserably,” said Bob. “It’s about education, about changing behaviour.”

Andy Hughes, the Elm Tree’s owner, needed no persuading. “The days are gone when licensees could rely on Friday and Saturday nights to see them through the rest of the week,” he said.

They’ve produced 5,000 copies of the guide, also have an online edition.

It majors on ten pubs – Durham classics like the Victoria, the Half Moon and the Shakespeare, newcomers like Wetherspoons and the Head of Steam – includes another 11 within what’s reckoned walking distance of the city centre.

The launch lasted getting on two hours. Thereafter, the hardy were taking themselves around the other nine featured pubs before concentrating minds on a quiz in the evening.

Whatever it might look like to the uninitiated, in Camra it’s what’s known as an interim working group, collating data.

STILL in the slipstream of the day the Vulcan bomber came down on Station Town in East Durham – January 7, 1971 – Martin Donbavand sends a lengthy and rather splendid email.

Unlike many of the Internet conspiracy theorists, Martin was part of it – or, at least, watching open mouthed from the playground.

“It brilliantly broke up the tedium of school routine,” he recalls. “Counselling?

Pah. Those who needed to were told to get a grip.”

Forty years, he suspects, has created a mushroom cloud of exaggeration.

“The field of the crash site was occupied by a couple of horses who were described as frantic.

“Who or what wouldn’t be if 204,000lbs of molten metal has just slammed into your lunch? No doubt they were given a sugar lump before being shipped off to Cherry Knowle.”

Martin was a Wingate lad. Technically and geographically, he concedes, the Vulcan came down on Station Town, next door – “but there was no way they were going to steal our thunder.”

STILL reading notice boards after all these years, we reported a couple of summers back on the launch of the 36-mile Isaac’s Tea Trail, in the hills around Allenheads and Upper Weardale.

Isaac Holden was a sort of early 19th Century Rington’s man – minus van, of course – whose tea was probably better than some of the poems he also tried to sell door-to-door.

The whole thing’s assiduously been promoted by Roger Morris, in Washington, who reports that the trail is not just included in a new book called 501 Must-Visit Wild Places – “a selection of Planet Earth’s most famous wonders along with many lesser known marvels” – but that US university lecturer Keith Stewart has been across to make a film of it.

Only nine of the book’s 501 marvels are in England, including the North York Moors. Its suggestion that the North Pennines area of outstanding natural beauty stretches from Carlisle to Darlington – “everyone who appreciates the great outdoors will be instantly captivated” – may be a little elastic, however.

However wild, Roger’s just delighted at the exposure. “Isaac and his tea trail,” he says, “have come an awfully long way from a notice board in Nenthead.”