I’m getting quite addicted to my little hotel in Weaste, the rough bit of Elegant Eccles.
Four stays in 3 months, AND they give me a 5% loyalty discount, so I only paid £27 the other Sunday. H & C in all rooms.
As you can see, I took the lesser-known tourist trail from Weaste tram stop around Weaste cemetery (bookings only) down to Salford Quays.
Partly on the off-chance one of the craft brewers on Daniel Adamson Way would be open ahead of the Bank Holiday,
and partly because I’m a nosey sod, and I fancied poking around the back of Media City.
As I never bore of telling you, Manchester is a glorious city.
Salford isn’t bad either, particularly if you can avoid the sight of City’s li’l neighbours across the Irwell in neighbouring Trafford (top).
The Quays aren’t packed on Sunday night; many of the modern bars are long shut. It’s a bit Canary Wharf without the bankers.
To be honest you won’t drag many Mancunians away from Mackie Mayor or “new improved” Stockport (I’m winding you up, I’m winding you up).
But there’s a smattering of families enjoying the BBC displays and chain diners before they too join Jamie’s (R.I.P.) in the scrapheap of “me too” dining concepts.
We’re up in Manchester for a couple of days tonight. I might bring Mrs RM back to the Quays and give the Dock Yard another go.
Bar a brief spell for Craft Brew, the Quays has been a resolutely GBG-free zone since the start. Not that BBC staff would ever recognise a Proper Pub and would be terrified by the thought of a pint in the Circus.
Even the Dockyard feels a bit “craft bar for easily scared people“.
Nothing to scare the horses, or the sheep, here.
Surely I’ll go for the Pomona from just down the road ?
Ten minutes flicking though WhatPub on the walk had suggested this may be the most likely pre-emptive in the Quays, so I felt compelled to go cask.
No, I didn’t really. A schooner of the keg Blackjack Dry.Hop.Sour to mark me down as a toper of discernment. It was a good choice.
Being cutting-edge the music came from Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell and the equally criminally neglected first Arctic Monkeys LP.
From my high table I counted sales of about five pints of Pravha and three pints of Sharp’s Pils. Of cask and craft keg, not a sausage.
One was enough. Sadly, Hyde’s don’t have a craft bar at their brewery, so that was my evening done.
I didn’t even pop in here.
retiredmartin 
‘Forgotten Gold’?
Is there a plum shortage in North Staffordshire ?
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I do hope not.
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I had a pint of Titanic’s Forgotten Gold in their Sun this afternoon and it’s quite a complex beer with me not having guessed which spice is in it.
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You missed out on popping in to a Holts pub. Always decent characters in those. Especially in Salford!!!!
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I missed out on Holts’s Eagle in Salford recently.
I got there at 12.20pm ( after the Hare & Hounds and Lower Turks Head ) not realising that it didn’t open until 3pm.
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Although the BBC purports to be a general-purpose broadcaster, might I enlighten the attentive reader, with the fact that it is also the most highly-resourced news organisation in the EU?
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And long may that continue.
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“News”? You sure about that?
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Might I remind you, that, wishing to avoid competition, newspaper publishers persuaded the government to ban the BBC from broadcasting news before 7:00 pm, and to force it to use wire service copy instead of reporting on its own. On Easter weekend in 1930 (18 April), this reliance on newspaper wire services left the radio news service with no information to report. After saying “There is no news today”, piano music was played instead.
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In that situation today, John Humphrys would ask the piano what it thought of “Boris”.
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A mononymous person is an individual, who is known and addressed by a single name, or mononym. In some cases, that name has been selected by the said individual, who may have originally been given more than one name. However, in others, it has been determined by the customs of the country, or by some interested sector.
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The edict has gone out – he is not allowed to be called Boris any more,following a request by former Labour spin liar Alastair Campbell.
The BBC have jumped to attention.
There’s nothing more pathetic than seeing that jug-eared Grand National entrant Andrew Marr interject with ” Johnson ” every time a guest had the temerity to call him Boris this morning.
Anyway,that apart,today calls for some judicious drinking as I attempt to stay up late enough to witness the European election results into the early hours.
I try to come up with a different drink concoction for every election loosely based around Belgian beer – I road-tested a new one on Friday night and it’s a winner.
Leffe and Erdinger combined.
What a lovely drop.
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Not everyone is aware, that Alistair Campbell spent a year teaching in a secondary school in the south of France as part of his academic degree course. While in Nice, he spent a great deal of time on busking with bagpipes, and on developing a lifelong interest in the Belgian singer, Jacques Brel. While hitchhiking back to Nice from Aix-en-Provence, he learned of the singer’s death, and shared stories with the Belgian lorry driver who had picked him up, an episode which would later become the subject of a BBC radio documentary and subsequent play.
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Eccles has only been in the City of Salford since 1974 and to locals they’re still very much two separate places, with the M6/M30 psotcode boundary the dividing line (there was some grumbling in 2011 when Salford rugby league club left their home ground at the Willows in Weaste for a new one in Barton-on-Irwell, which many fans saw as them leaving Salford, and a lot more in 2017 when the maternity unit at Hope Hospital, just over the boundary in Salford, closed and then relocated to Swinton, with people upset that their children would no longer be born within the city’s traditional borders).
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Matthew,
And that’s not all that happened in 1974.
Manchester extended southwards to take on Robinsons Brewery and a few thousand drinkers living nearby.
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“H & C in all rooms.”
Is that in reference to running water* or a hovercraft full of eels?
“Nope”
You’d think with seven of them they could all take turns on the holidays.
“Close them down now”
What? Costa Coffee? 😉
“IWM & OT”
IHNIWYM (I have no idea what you mean).
“and chain diners ”
Is that like chain smokers? They run from restaurant to restaurant over the ‘course’ of the evening? 😉
“We’re up in Manchester for a couple of days tonight. ”
You squeezed a couple of days into one night?
“Intriguing”
If only the Titanic had some plum in it.
“A schooner of the keg Blackjack Dry.Hop.Sour ”
According to the blackboard there should be a space between Dry. and Hop. 🙂
“Being cutting-edge the music came from Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell”
Funnily enough that was on the local radio here a few days ago (and both me and the missus enjoyed it). 🙂
“I didn’t even pop in here.”
Blimey.
Cheers
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