retiredmartin

November 2023. Wisbech.

A final Cambridgeshire Guide tick, and yet more GBG24 joy as I’m taken kicking and screaming to Wisbech, which a bit of me still believes in is Lincolnshire. Perhaps GBG25 will place it there, like that pub in Danehill that keeps moving back and forth across the Sussex borders.

I know you want to know a bit about those mysterious places just west of Wisbech.

Well, my dad played football against Parson Drove and told me 50 years later they were thugs.

I went to a funeral of a relative in Murrow 30 years ago; he’d run the local petrol station for years and the fuel pumps were tied together in a cross; apparently it’s a “tradition”.

But it’s been a GBG wasteland between the home of Elgoods and Whittlesey (home of the Straw Bear) for many years, so welcome the Potting Shed.

Looks like a garden centre.

No, it really does.

I actually drove a tractor like this 45 years ago.

AND I worked school holidays in a greenhouse like this;

Blimey, Manea and Erdinger in the same room, what a clash of cultures.

Actually, there’s 100 years of horticultural history at the site of the Potting Shed, which is now a campsite and “events” venue, and by far the smartest thing I’ve ever seen in Wisbech.

The campsite had just closed, and it really comes to life on Friday nights when cutting-edge music elves arrives.

Beer from the plant pot, which makes a change for me, or via the high handled dispense patented by Butcombe.

The Mile Tree beer from down the road in Peterborough was gorgeous (3.5),

the staff made an awkwardly quiet visit pleasant, and I contemplated the inevitable Fenland pudding,

but instead took Mrs RM a 7.5% Porter home.

Sadly, she wasn’t there, so I had to drink it myself. I’m helpful like that.

Anyway, here’s the pinking.