October 2024. Waterbeach to Birmingham.
Mum’s stay in hospital dragged on into a second week*, insufferable to her and challenging to us as we’d left the heating on awaiting her return and were melting in the heat (though the lack of WiFi is the bigger issue).
I grabbed a night’s long planned respite in Birmingham, as you do, deciding late on I didn’t fancy getting the campervan nicked from a Digbeth car park and that the train should take the strain.
The budget highlight. apart from the penny cut on CAMRA approved “good beer“, is approval for the Cambridge to Oxford rail route, which will give pub tickers from those two cask deserts the opportunity the mecca of real ale that is Milton Keynes.
Getting a train from east to west, or left to right if you will, has always been a problem in the UK, but at least the CrossCountry Cambridge to Brum route is fairly direct,
once you’ve endured a second consecutive 45 minute wait at Ely.
Somehow I resisted the lure of another Goose IPA and lukewarm pie in favour of Americano and a chat with an excitable programmer whose route to Barrow-in-Furness via Liverpool Street had been scuppered by (shock ! horror !) a train cancellation. We bonded over comparisons of German v Italian rail, and no doubt ignored my Barrow pub recommendations.
My route takes me deep into Fenland, over the Wash,
and the Victoriana of March,
and Peterborough, where a Japanese boy (not Aneka’s) boarded with a Peterborough United bag (top), probably containing a Barry Fry mug.
I broke my journey in Leicester, the only stop with a new GBG pub to tick, decided against a vegetarian curry at Bobby’s, and instead annoyed pedestrians by stopping to admire the frescoes.
It’s a city that hasn’t has enough love since an esteemed bunch of Pub Men visited seven years ago,
and while it’s never making the Southworth’s Top 10 of UK cities,
I was about to be reminded that its charms extend beyond a king in a car park and the greatest sporting shock of all time.
*She came home last night. Thanks, Addenbrookes.
retiredmartin 
It’s been on many of our itineraries and somehow never happened. From the posts I read it seems underrated by the beer literati.
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I’ve only ever driven round it, so can’t really comment, unless more or less avoiding the place, counts as a comment.
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Top Aneka reference. Wasn’t she a Scottish librarian?
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A trad Scottish musician and tour guide for Stirling I read. Totally rejected attempts to get her to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon.
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