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
April 2026. Manchester. Quite a contrast between the central squares in Tyldesley, and Manchester, where I find Mrs RM in the art gallery. Well, the cafe. She tells me the city looks gorgeous in the sun, the flashy high rise...
April 2026. Tyldesley. You can’t come to Tyldesley and just do the lone new GBG entry. Perhaps I should have gone craft, but the lure of the longstanding “Proper” pub was too strong, so the Union Arms it was. Thwaites on the bar, a clear...
April 2026. Tyldesley. A slight post now, perhaps, but I thought you’d like to see the highlights of my mile walk through central Tyldesley (pop. 16,142) in Wigan’s old colliery belt. Love a Monkey Puzzle tree. A spotless red brick town,...
April 2026. Tyldesley. My GBG newbie is over a mile from the centre of Tyldesley, in an area of neatly kept old mine workers houses, pleasant if unremarkable. You’ll need to cross the A580 into Astley for the really interesting houses...
April (finally !) 2026. Manchester to Tyldesley. You learn a lot about the UK transport networks as a pub ticker. Some towns stand out as tough to tick, particularly the string of mining towns without a railway station between Manchester...
March 2026. Waterbeach. Waterbach Gault looked rather lovely last Tuesday. Less so, the contents of the skip we’d hired to clear muck from garage and potting shed. The house sale rumbles into its 15th month, quite the most stressful 15...
March 2026. Chesterton. Back down in Waterbeach, where Dad was looking better groomed than myself, and then a catch-up with Dortmund Annie to discuss “stuff” at the Haymakers. A possible answer to a quiz question, Milton (via Waterbeach)...
March 2026. Sheffield. We have more honoured guests arriving next month, so we used Sunday to do a risk assessment on the nearby streets leading to pubs, starting with the toughest of them all. Actually, the Blake Hotel isn’t too bad to...
March 2026. Norton. North Yorkshire.. Not THAT Norton, Dave If you include virtually contiguous (love that word) Norton as well as Malton the population is 12,275, I read that somewhere. Norton is very much Malton’s hidden away ugly...
March 2026. Malton. North Yorkshire. Before I cross over the picturesque Derwent to my second pub, I must reflect on Malton’s astonishing pub scene. Ignore those grey Ps (unless in Wolverhampton); I make that fifteen (15) pubs for 4,888...
March 2026. Malton. North Yorkshire. This won’t make a lot of sense to most of you, but my brain only really comes to life when I’m taking in new sights, sounds and smells experiences, which is why the repetition of those A1 trips from...
March 2026. York. You might think the hardest part of the pub ticking game, the toughest in the world, is working out which one of the sods are going to deign to actually be open when you tip up. But actually it’s the logistics of...
March 2026. Long Sutton. Lincolnshire. A couple of nights down in Waterbeach seeing Dad, eating Nepalese mixed grill at the White Horse, and trying to fathom out the new post box on The Gault. and then, like Supertramp, the long way home...
March 2026. Heeley. Sheffield. Mrs RM couldn’t bear being inside any longer either, and on Tuesday we took the tram out east to the housing estates of Park Grange, with a view to Bramhall Lane and not much else. 20 minutes downhill...
March 2026. Sheffield. Sheffield is a great city but I can’t spend a whole day there. Mid-afternoon on Monday I headed down to the station, intending to bring you exciting reports from, I dunno, Retford or Adwick. But there was “trouble...