IN Beggarsdale, we still haven't fully recovered from the shock of foot and mouth. We came close to losing the Beggars' Arms and, over the tops, the Crooked Inn did go under.

And although some of us found it hard to digest, we did finally come to terms with the fact the tourism is of vital importance, both to the Dales and the nation as a whole.

So why, may I ask, are we so overwhelmingly awful at making foreigners welcome to our shores?

I pose this question because, last week, I had to drive to Manchester Airport to pick up the Curmudgeonlet after his exhausting 16-hour flight from the Far East - and found Ringway about as welcoming as an open sewer.

He was, of course, an hour late although his plane had left Singapore just 10 minutes behind schedule - and had made that up. He landed on time: trouble was, there was nowhere on the airport for the plane to park so they sat on taxiing strip for 40 minutes.

In the meantime, having risen at 5am - early even by my standards - I was getting peckish so I treated myself to a "full English breakfast." Pure madness!

There was no-one at the serving counter and only a panic-stricken, patently ill-trained girl at the till, and it took me three visits to get my breakfast: one to order and pay for it (in advance), a second to go back an get it when the egg was cooked, and the third to get the slices of toast which had been forgotten.

It would have been four but for the fact that a rather nice young girl personally delivered a knife to my table: there hadn't been one in the cutlery tray, and I was struggling to eat this dog's dinner of a breakfast with only a fork.

It was served on a plate the size of a sixpence (that's pretty small, kiddiewinks) and, of course, there is a well known caterer's reason for that: the smaller the plate, the less food you have to put on it to make it look full.

Anyway, the beans kept dripping on the table and, until the knife arrived, I had to resort to eating the rock-hard bacon from between my fingers.

Now this is pretty routine. Any Brit has suffered meals like this in numerous places, most of them connected with travel: a railway buffet, a motorway service area, a cross-channel ferry.

But here's the nub: the bill! In ordering my "fully English breakfast" at £3.99, I had not known about the extras. My tiny pot of cold tea was £1.20, the orange juice a hefty £1.55, and two slices of toast an outrageous £1.05. And the VAT of course: £1.16.

In fact, this awful, badly served, badly presented and badly cooked meal cost me £7.79. There are still little roadside restaurants in France where, for that price, you could get a three-course dinner of mouth-watering local dishes.

And it was a meal that I shouldn't have needed, had my son's plane had somewhere to park. (I will suppress the thought that a major airport would deliberately engineer such delays to boost its restaurant and bar takings).

But this, I should remind you, had just been the first experience of Britain for hundreds of athletes competing in the Commonwealth Games. It is a first, too, for millions of tourists who - thankfully - have decided they want their visit to Britain include a sight of the North.

Let's hope that they are not hungry on arrival. First we rip them off and then we make them sick. Welcome to Olde England, Johnny Foreigner.

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.