THEY are going down like flies. But here in Beggarsdale, we don't know whether to laugh or cry. What we do know is there will be some changes to be made...

Five pubs in our neck of the Dales have closed in the past few weeks, a cause of much debate and many a furrowed brow in the Beggars' Arms. For these hostelries had been part - a distant part, admittedly - of many of our lives for as long as we can remember.

When we were young, we would walk or cycle to them and eat our snap on their outside benches. The cricket and rugby teams met at them after away games.

When we were old enough to own a car or a motorbike, we took our girlfriends there to get in a bit of discrete courting away from the prying eyes and tut-tutting lips of our elders and betters.

They were, in other words, as much part of our landscape as Tup Fell or the Dale itself.

And now they are closed and dark, their owners gone and often broke, the buildings most likely doomed to become private houses for wealthy offcumdens.

However, the biggest shock of all is that one of the victims of this catering collapse is the Crooked Inn over the tops in Crookedale, the pub we Beggarsdalians loved to hate. For generations, the Crook (as it has always been known this side of Tup Fell) has sustained a bitter rivalry with the Beggars. Their cricket, rugby, doms and darts teams faced ours with implacable fury - and they are still suspected of stealing our rugby goal posts a few days before Bonfire Night some years ago.

To be seen in the Crook on non-competition nights was, for a Beggarsdalian, deemed an act of high treason, only to be atoned for by the purchase of large quantities of drinks - in the Beggars, of course. In fact, Cousin Kate, the postmistress, has yet to be totally forgiven for marrying Mean Mike, a Crookedalian, and that was nigh on 40 years ago.

But now the Crook is closed.

Our first reaction, on hearing this stunning news, was to laugh.

"We've beaten the bleepers once and for all," growled Owd Tom in glee. But then the gloom set in. Life without the Crook will be, well, like life in Yorkshire without Lancashire. It is as though they had abandoned the Roses matches with YCCC champs for the first time in yonks.

"What'll we do now?" asked Ben the Bucket. We were even nice to Mean Mike that night.

Then the Innkeeper, a forward thinking man (and one who has survived this terrible year only thanks to us regulars) dropped his bombshell: "That means they'll have to come here for a gill. I hope we are going to behave ourselves."

No one had thought of this. It was, perhaps, too big a concept to grasp without long preparation.

The Beggars - crammed with Crookedalians? It would be like mixing pepper and salt (or, perhaps more aptly, dynamite and a lighted fuse). "They've nowhere else to go," the Innkeeper went on. "The next nearest pub is nine miles away. Unless they go into Mar'ton, that is." We shuddered. Mar'ton, on a weekend night at least, makes Dodge City look like Leamington Spa. "Aye," said the Innkeeper's lady, "there'll have to be some changes made."

Change? In Beggarsdale? I smell trouble ahead ...

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