retiredmartin

October 2023. Hilcote. Derbyshire.

If you didn’t use the Good Beer Guide you’d never end up in weird places like Holbeach, and Rainham, and Paisley.

And your life would be immeasurably less fulfilling with a life spent attending beer festivals and drinking cans of murk in your underpants.

The GBG introduced me to the joys of the northern East Midlands mining villages early on,

and we regularly dragged innocent children away for weekends in South Normanton and Belper, in more innocent times when a 10 year old was happy with a ramshackle play area and ice cream machine while Mrs RM explored the East Midlands Outlet Centre at Sutton.

You can walk to Hilcote from the Nike shop in your Air Max 95s, but I’ve kindly provided a bus timetable,

And the exciting parish council finance committee agenda.

How I miss my career of finance committees.

The population of Hilcote (350) were largely engaged in mining, but the not the glamorous South Yorkshire type immortalised in “Brassed Off”, oh no.

It took me ages to work out that “B” Winning was the name of a mine and not a Ripley rapper.

Great looking pub,

one beer (is plenty), two ciders,

three big characters at the bar. One of them a besuited landlord, one wears a chef’s hat, one sits at the bar providing the wet-led custom.

The Welbeck is beautifully presented and tasty, and a bit more throughput would have pushed it beyond my 3.

“See ya ma duck” calls the landlady, which tells you exactly where you are in the world.

It’s a throwback to simpler times, when Paul Simon ruled the charts, and so of course we get Graceland.

The landlord gives me a copy of the lunch menu, and I feel almost guilty I’m not staying, particularly at those prices.

In a village of 350 the local pub needs all the diners it can get. I bet they’re all in the outlet centre, queueing for Burger King.