retiredmartin

Too hot for long posts. I may escape to Scotland tomorrow where it’s cool.

Anyway, a night in Scarborough. Always a treat, even more so with TWO new Guide pubs this year, neither of them micros.

What a great name for a pub.  Sounds like an Antic in East London.

Only GBG devotees would find themselves in a Council Social Club when there’s a North Riding tap and the Valley Bars and fish and chips in town.

But the joy of Doing The Guide is you get to meet a range of folk, most of them relatively harmless.

I enter to the sound of The Christians singing “Ideal World“, and pause to reflect on how different pubs would be without the music of 1987.

There’s three blokes spread over three tables, and a lady who gets up to serve me.  This is 7.40pm; will it get busy at 10 ?

Three microbrewery ales; I choose North Riding in honour of Richard, who championed their beers tirelessly.  A cool, tasty NBSS 3.5.  They rarely ley you down.

Richard may well have been here, dragged into a conversation, inevitably, about Boycott. The chap nearest me had just seen Yorkshire skittle Surrey at Scarborough to clinch an unlikely 22 points.

But the banter is all about formats, and the Hundred, and what Boycott would make of it. I throw in my two penn’orth, imagining Boycs and Tavare opening in a T20 for England.

In England, if you want to join in a conversation with locals, talk about the weather.

In Yorkshire, just mention Boycott and the cricket.