retiredmartin

October 2024. Cavendish. Suffolk.

Always slightly irritating when you realise a new GBG entry was mere minutes from a pub you visited only months ago (Clare),

but Mrs RM was keen to make a trip out to Cavendish in posh but dull Suffolk, and frankly there’s nothing closer to Waterbeach to tick.

You’ll get a full photographic essay on this stunning little village, but the Five Bells deserves it’s own post,

even if it feels a bit “Home and Housekeeping Monthly” on entrance.

In fact, it looks like a display case for the antiques and home decorating stores up the road in Sudbury.

I thought it would be packed with gentlefolk diners on Friday lunchtime,

but it seems the dining trade comes from the food carts that pitch up in the car park early evening (Thai tonight), and the pub Facebook instead is focused on the “real ale drinkers” and a small B & B trade.

Halloween comes earlier every year, doesn’t it ?

The Old Spooky Hen Mrs RM wants has already gone, so she has the Colchester while I feel obliged to have a 133rd attempt since the Railway in Mellis (2012) to find a pint of Greene King IPA that’s worth the effort.

It just about succeeds; “cool and robust” say my notes (NBSS 3.5), as is the Colchester. It’s the sort of beer consistency you get throughout Essex, and we’re virtually at the county border.

We spread out among the Chesterfields and squidgy armchairs, but I can’t imagine the local lager trade sitting anywhere but at the bar, where they chat to the wonderfully cheery barmaid about show jumping and give advice on how to pull the beer through.

An insight into village life, one of the best views across a village green in the country,

and an astonishing soundtrack shift as we enter to “Jailhouse Rock” and leave to this one;

In a pub world dominated by the Eurythmics and Dire Straits, that really was an ’80s flashback I wasn’t expecting.