Tuesday evening. The clouds cleared, and Mrs RM graced me with her presence on a walk round dead Cambridge pubs.
We stopped at the cash point at the magnificent Lloyds, but I’m STILL using the cash I took out on 13th March.
QUIZ – What’s the WORST name this “pub” has been saddled with;
Cambridge was quiet, bar the pizza munching of a few dozen Italian and Spanish youngsters, for whose custom and vitality we should be grateful.
Except for the pizza takeaway that used to be a Cornish pasty shop, the market had nothing for the hungry.
Now, book shops in Cambridge are allowed to look a little fusty, it adds to the appeal.
But pubs can look a little forlorn after 3 months of lockdown, with leaves piling up at the door and menus falling of the glass as blu-tack gives up the ghost.
So 2 cheers for BrewDog for opening up to sell pints of beer (in sealed containers for takeout), keeping the lights on in every sense and making Bene’t Street look half alive despite Greene King’s best efforts.
And their staff are unfailingly cheerful, particularly now they don’t have to give out endless tasters to taster scroungers.
They’d have a third cheer if they actually used that cask beer pump they installed.
But Mrs RM is no purist, and was happy to sink the 8.5% Skeleton Crew from Foley of Vermont. It was gorgeous, less fizzy than the BD stock beers that I’m tiring of a bit.
There are few better places to enjoy murk than on the wall outside King’s.
Yes, yes, it cost £7.51 a pint. Deal with it, Mudgies. Not many places will serve you a pint of 8.5% DIPA, even in Lockdown.
We made sure that no-one was attempting to topple Cambridge’s most famous statue,
and headed home.
retiredmartin 
d’Arry’s and Stolen are a pretty good match on the pretentious scale. Stolen seems to win when one finds all the clever uses of the name regarding menu choices…
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You needed to dig deeper, Dave. It was, for a short period in the ’90s, the “Rattle & Hum”. Used to be a good pub.
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LOL. Rattle and Hum may win the quiz. Not really a fan of Stolen though. Pretty cutesy.
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Fusty…the smell of wine which, has taken too much from the barrel…musty…dusty…Dusty Springfield was in fact called Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien. Her elder brother, Dionysius P. A. O’Brien, was later known as Tom Springfield.
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Those are all nice names.
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“QUIZ – What’s the WORST name this “pub” has been saddled with;”
I remember that ‘Stolen’ in the mid 1970s as the Cambridge Arms, one of a minority of Cambridge’s Greene King pubs to sell real ale at a time when most of their beer was served by top pressure not handpump.
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I’ve also still got cash that I withdrew pre-lockdown.
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If you don’t spend it before the end of the EU withdrawal period it gets cancelled, of course Paul. That’s how we’re paying off the National Debt.
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I thought it was only the £5 notes featuring Winston Churchill that had been demonetarised.
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The Pasty Shop has gone 😱
One wonders whether the pokey bustling ‘mini-souk’ street-food and records market ever open again…
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Not a fan of pasties from foreign countries like Cornwall. Better news on the market, certainly some of it open recently, including the Thai.
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Phew! I’ll sellotape the Cambridge page back into the atlas.
I would imagine that Thirsty would be well placed to open something for the Summer given their track record of pop-up outdoor bars. The one in the churchyard was a highlight of our last trip to the city.
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Ah, yes, Thirsty. We enjoyed the churchyard. There was a new pop-up on the slopes down from the Industrial Museum to the river which would have cleaned up over the last 2 months. You could keep tables apart but it would be extra work for the business.
Pint Shop were selling beer in litre bottles and a glass to drink on the grass.
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On Monday I was driving back from Manchester and made a note of how long it was from my usual marker of the Fox (Food), Used to take 35 minutes, been taking 45 for years; now it takes 26.
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“and menus falling of the glass as blu-tack gives up the ghost.” –a classic bit of RetiredMartin prose, if ever there was one. Glorious.
I do wonder how you feel about the somewhat compromised experience of a carry-out pint, which surely pales when compared against the full pub experience; but is possibly rather grand when put against the “no interaction with pubs whatsoever” experience of these past few months. 🙂
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I had an image of a family diner in (say) Rosebud, Missouri with signs falling down when I wrote that, Mark.
It’ll take a while for our beloved pubs and diner to get back to their best.
BrewDog isn’t very pubby so a chance to drink a pint outside in the sun is probably a bonus compared to high tables inside!
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