Back to the Sussex Downs, where Mrs RM was delighted to discover that eight drops of rain had fallen, meaning my planned eight mile walk to Alfriston had been replaced with a pint in the Eight Bells in Jevington.
GBG aficionados will know the Downs is a hotbed of GBG activism, home to classic village pubs in Milton Street, Berwick, Litlington and Alfriston.
Mrs RM, however, knows the area best for the zoo at Drusilla’s Park where she narrowly survived an attack by a meerkat in 1975.
You’re safer in a pub. #FACT
“A pint of something strong and the WiFi code” she says and dashes for the loo table by the window.
I join the queue of backpacks, not a Fjallraven Kankken among them.
A delightful ale range, though nothing to excite Mrs RM.
And a disappointment coming upon the WiFi front.
In 1995 there wouldn’t have been an assumption you were dining with them like there is now.
Mrs RM shows her Bulldog Brit spirit.
“You’ll just have to talk to me then !”
“Whaaaaaaat !”
Go Kirsty.
Anyway, we survive. The beer is cool and decent enough, NBSS 3 stuff. and the soundtrack stretches from Sweet Home Alabama to Benny & the Jets i.e. about 12 months.
Oddly, the Harvey’s is foamy, the Hophead is thin. Why is that ?
It’s always entertaining watching folks coming in with their rucksacks, particularly when you know they’ve only walked from the Grade I listed church up the hill.
We actually walked a little further up the hill towards Alfriston, before I conceded that my footwear was as inappropriate as Mrs RM’s and called it quits.
I promised her I’d got some good photos on the walk. I was fibbing.
retiredmartin 
Was the meerkat called Simon?
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HSB is strong 😛
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4.8% is a boys bitter these days.
Can you say “boys bitter”?
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You can say it, but, if you put up an old pumpclip of one as a bar decoration, you’d have to take it down and replace it with one that said “gender neutral pleasant fluid”.
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I’ll go with Dark Star Hophead.
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Plenty of reports that it’s not a patch on what it was, and apparently brewed at Chiswick now.
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Probably some truth in that, and I don’t much care for the other Chiswick beers either these days.
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Genius beer man.
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Loved your line, “stretches from Sweet Home Alabama to Benny & the Jets i.e. about 12 months.” If you put together all the times I’ve heard those songs it would probably come to about 12 months. 😉
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Bennie & the Jets isn’t one of Elton’s top hits but heard it a bit recently, possibly because of the film.
A very mid 70s selection culminated in If You Leave Me Now, beautifully hummed by Mrs RM.
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Called in at the Eight Bells towards the end of my Weald Way walk, nine years ago. Looked in on the church a couple of years previously, on the first leg of walking the South Downs Way.
Good walking country, and some good pubs, as you so rightly point out, Martin.
The jury’s still out on Hophead, as far as I’m concerned, although I always regarded it a thin-tasting beer. People are very quick to point the finger, when there’s a change, but it might just be perception rather than reality.
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I have to say the selfie outside the church looks nothing like you or your better half…
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