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. Leicester. Regular readers will know I’m no fan of history, which is I why I follow a team founded in 2008 and can’t tell my Art Deco from my Art Nouveau (or Garfunkel). But apparently Leicester is even more famous for a...
October 2025. Leicester. 36 hours in Leicester, and with lunchtime approaching (though we’d barely finished breakfast) it’s time to explore the castle. Leicester looked quite lively with shoppers that late October Thursday, but tourist...
October 2025. Leicester. 36 hours in Leicester, and a busy morning for Mrs RM if she’s going to tick her deers, the tourist highlights she’s got from ChatGPT blogs. Starting with Curveside Bistro’s Turkish breakfast, and the fonts of the...
October 2025. Leicester. Having paid for a night’s accommodation in the centre of Leicester that Wednesday (£60 at the well-equipped* Ramada Encore) I wasn’t going to bed at 6, even if Mrs RM was. A bit of night-time street art ? Nah,...
October 2025. Leicester. 36 hours in Leicester; time to complete the GBG entries for the county and provide Mrs RM with enough material for her own blogpost to boost tourist trade, provisionally titled “Oh, go on, it can’t be worse than...
October 2025. Leicester. A large gap (well, 3 hours) between pubs now as Mrs RM does a deep dive into her map of Leicester tourist deers (above), which I ignore and instead take photos of painted Cliff Richard albums, and colourful...
October 2025. Leicester. 36 hours in Leicester, loads to tick on Mrs RM’s “deer map“, let’s get my last Leicestershire tick (there WAS only one newbie, incredibly) and an early lunch at the Clarendon. In truth, a lot of Leicester seemed...
October 2025. Leicester. The last trip of the month, as we become Leicester’s tourists. Just under the hour from Sheffield, just under £25 off-peak return, and budget hotels right next to the Ale Wagon (of which more later). 36 hours,...
October 2025. Borough. Trinity Four Guide London pubs on Monday raised hopes of a rare “ten pub week”, the sort of thing BRAPA knocks out in his sleep on his way to GBG immortality. I almost skipped the Trinity in favour of an old...
October 2025. Elephant & Castle. London. You left me on Hungerford Bridge after leaving the Old Shades, admiring the view. The view changes rapidly as you leave the culture of South Bank and the sunset over Waterloo Station to head the...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...