retiredmartin
retiredmartin
Martin
Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.
Latest Posts
October 2025. Toddington. A slightly different route from north to south last week, with an ultra-rare visit to bucolic Bedfordshire. Toddington (nice village sign) is your gateway to the mysteries of Central Beds, including the...
October 2025. Sheffield. I don’t do beer festivals (or tasters, or dimpled mugs) but I also don’t turn down invites from Pub royalty, either, so put principles aside and joined Alfie/Ian/Mr Chelsea on his Sheffield overnighter, starting...
October 2025. Waterbeach. Can I get the blog up-to-date before month-end ? Worth a go. While BRAPA reminds me of that glorious Summer of 2022 as he conquers the Scottish isles, I’m condemned to an eternal journey betwixt Sheffield and...
October 2025. Covent Garden. London. My first London ticking of the new GBG season, always a joy, and as I leave the corner pubs of Bloomsbury it’s time to “Do the culture“. Five minutes from the Lady Ottoline to Sir John Soane’s house,...
October 2025. Bloomsbury. London. A second new GBG London corner pub in two minutes, and for a second time I wonder “How’s this evaded the Beer Guide so long ?“. Only now does my detective work reveal the Lady Ottoline was previously the...
October 2025. Bloomsbury. London. Two nights a week down in Waterbeach visiting Dad for free cups of tea and ’60s entertainment; that also gives me a chance to get to grips with London’s new Beer Guide entries. I may not be competitively...
October 2025. Matlock. Your £10.15 day return to Matlock from Sheff gives you an hour and six minutes, which is just enough time to tick your new GBG entry, consider how pretty England is in The Fall*, wonder if there’s a bar in that...
October 2025. Matlock. Matlock always feels a long way away from Sheffield, tucked away on the edge of the Peak, and it’s true you have to get there via an irritating 12 minute change at Derby (irritating in the sense that 12 minutes...
October 2025. Sheffield. I’m still working out how many pubs I’d need to visit to complete the new Good Beer Guide; Simon had worked out his “churn” a month ago. But it hardly matters. There’s no way I’m repeating the heroics of 2022,...
22nd October 2025. Sheffield. “What’s new in Sheffield ?” ask folk heading over for one of the UK’s top pub crawls. Well, lots of new buildings, mainly food courts and flats, but not a lot of new pubs, outside the odd sports bar and a...
October 2025. Waterbeach. A deluge of posts now I’m (briefly, possibly) back “home” in Sheffield with Wi-Fi. Back from a rainy Romania to a damp Luton, we headed straight to see how Dad was recovering from his “bounce”. We also listened...
October 2025. Peles Castle. Sinai. Romania. Mrs RM was so determined to squeeze a Transylvanian castle into her blog our trip that on our final morning in Romania we woke at 6am, took a Bolt to Brasov station, and an hour later were in...
October 2025. Sighisoara. You left us in our astonishing £36.27 Sighisoara guest house wondering where the catch was. A few reviews had mentioned that the breakfast didn’t include drinks, “you’ll pay extra for coffee at Paris prices“....
October 2025. Sighișoara. There are two main challenges writing these foreign blogs. One is finding the right button on the phone for the mysterious “comma below” in Romanian names, the other is limiting the number of photos so you don’t...
October 2025. Sighișoara. Romania. In the Uber on the way back from the bear cuddling Mrs RM devised a radical plan to boost her blog views. Leaving our room in Brasov for a night we caught a Flix bus from the main bus station, where the...