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. 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
October 2025. Barnby Moor. North Notts. “Barnby Moor ? Wherezat ?”. Well, if you’d read Roger Protz’s marvellous book on the Great North Road (£7 + postage) you’d know all about (Ye) Olde Bell in the posh bit of Bassetlaw (the bit that’s...
October 2025. St Albans. One of my favourite campervan stops is St Albans, about £7 overnight on a Sunday with no diggers (not that I’d recognise a digger if one licked me) and a quick train into St Pancras. After a quiet decade there’s...
October 2025. Fancott. Toddington. Oooh look ! An actual hamlet, comprising some woods, a stream, a miniature railway, and a pub, your second on the exciting “Pub Crawl from Toddington Services”. A debut Good Beer Guide dining pub, too,...
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...