retiredmartin

April 2024. Cambridge.

At weekends when I visit my parents the step count drops; from an average around 20k in Sheffield to 3,606 last Sunday. “You need to sit down and relax” says Mum. That’s the LAST thing I need to do at 59, and once they’re asleep I nip out to get some miles in.

To be honest, not many miles.

There’s only so many times you can walk the same streets, and 10 minutes after leaving Waterbeach I’m wondering what I’m going to do.

Admire the new station buildings, I guess.

The station approach and office buildings along Hills Road are as close as Cambridge gets to modernism,

and I assume they’re universally hated by Town and Gown alike.

On a whim I decide to visit a pub I’ve possibly never been in before.

It’s also possible it’s never been in the Good Beer Guide, quite an achievement in itself. Certainly it’s not on my Giant Spreadsheet of GBG pubs I’ve visited, and Pints and Pubs is silent on the matter.

I really ought to have a view on the Earl of Derby, one of the closest pubs to the station, the 6th form colleges and the abomination of a “leisure complex” that replaced the market which once Clash singles, knickers and pasties on May Day. One of very few pubs with accommodation, too.

And it’s a chance to have a third (count ’em) IPA in a row. On a Monday.

Well, it’s exactly what you expect, though with perhaps more of a locals feel than you’d expect (see also : The Alma), and it’s immensely pleasing the list of golf clubs captains has been updated after being stuck in 2012 when Pint & Pubs visited.

The description of “worn wooden floorboards in an uncelebrated, unpretentious pub” still holds, and I enjoyed the authoritative “We prefer cash” when I asked the Eternal Question.

The pub is probably a 3, where the Cambridge Blue is a 5 and the Brew Dog isn’t, and the thin IPA almost made it to a 3 as well, but not quite.

I mean, how many crimes does that glass commit ?

If this was your first experience of Greene King leaving Cambridge station you’d be unimpressed, but then the closest station pub is rarely the best, is it ?

A distinctly Irish feel, like the White Swan in the other direction, with bizarre conversations about Irish apples (Magners !), and more of that late ’80s soundtrack the city specialises in.

Games machines all around me flash, one tells of “Lady Luck”,

but it’s a different sort of luck being pushed in the Gents;

I briefly consider a second IPA of the night in The Rock, but the drizzle starts, which somehow only makes the footbridge over the tracks more beautiful.