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.
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
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All posts (720)
October 2025. Whitehall. London. While I sat in the Admiralty I scribbled down a few notes, mainly about queuing tourists and naff modern pop, but also “another week another two (2) London pubs two minutes apart“. Should have been 30 seconds to the Old Shades, but something in the space/time dimension where WC2...
October 2025. Trafalgar Square. London. Another year, another paltry handful of GBG newbies in what you’d imagine was a vast chapter of central London pubs. On the other hand, a lack of churn suggests consistent standards year-on-year, surely ? A couple of debutants right by Trafalgar Square within sight of Big Ben,...
October 2025. London. I should have said in that last post that I almost caught up with the blog in October; just a couple of Big Days Out in the capital and Leicester to bring you. Irritatingly, trains from Waterbeach were cancelled the last two weekends, which is when Fen Edge folk actually want to… Continue...
Another typical month of dashing between home and care home, with odd diversions from the route to tick a few Midlands and London pubs. Thirty-seven different pubs in October sounds pathetic, but there were also a bakers dozen in Romania to start the month, and if it had been in St Georges (Somerset) rather than…...
October 2025. Yarwell. Northamptonshire. Another day, another hitherto unexplored bit of “just off the A1“. I’d driven within yards of Yarwell, I guess, a thousand times or more times (fifty this year alone) and never stopped. Ditto Wansford. Another bit of ‘lil ol’ England that Mrs RM can include in her forthcoming...
October 2025. Newark. A final new tick in GBG for “Naughty” Nottinghamshire (there were only two), that naughtiness exemplified by the 2019 BRAPA Newark Northgate public urination scandal from which the town is still recovering, though the continued closure of the castle is apparently coincidental. Remarkably, this...
October 2025. Chaddesden. Derby. Back at Derby station from Tutbury, I reckoned it was worth chancing a dash to the Hoppy Place, Derby’s lone new GBG tick a couple of miles east. Out the station’s back entrance, through the grim light industry and Tier 2 football of Pride Park, over the Brian Clough expressway via…...
October 2025. Tutbury. As BRAPA will tell you, half the fun of GBG ticking is sitting down with the new Guide and working out legal routes to get to an isolated village by public transport. Then giving up and getting your dad to drive you. I’d forgotten Tutbury (& Hatton) had a station, just one… Continue reading...
October 2025. Sheffield. Up in Sheffield for a couple of nights before heading back down to see Dad, who barely recognises me now, but “stole Colin’s chicken” in the care home today, which shows fighting spirit. Two days to at least confirm our two lads were OK. On Saturday night they went out in Sheffield… Continue...
October 2025. Sheffield. It’s approaching five years since we escaped Cambridgeshire for The North, only to spend every week since driving back. That first six months in Lockdown Sheffield was spent gazing longingly at the Blake and Blind Monkey, impatient for their reopening. In 2020 the Blake was as famous as the...
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