retiredmartin

A few more 2024 highlights posts to come; best crispy beef, top graffiti, that sort of nonsense. But let’s kick off the new year’s post in an unlikely setting.

January 2025. Anglesey Abbey

You can walk to Anglesey Abbey from Waterbeach in an hour, as long as you’ve legs long enough to jump this stream by the mill.

We’ve just bought our joint National Trust membership, a sure sign of impending middle age, and join folk in Harbour and wellies to trudge around the stately pile admiring statues for 30 minutes,

avoiding the actual house,

though 30 minutes is good for us. We’ll do Wimpole if I’m really bored.

“Time for a pub ?” asks Mrs RM as dusk falls.

Quy’s White Swan is closed, New Year’s Day is hit and miss for pubs, but Bottisham’s Bell bucks the trend.

Remarkably, the Bell has escaped the attention of Untappd, and almost any venue in which alcohol is consumed can be checked in there.

I’m fairly sure a 16 year old schoolboy called Luke has checked in a can of Yonder behind the bike sheds of Bottisham’s dominating village college.

I walked the bounds during the COVID “one hour exercise window”, and mused that I’d make a first trip to the Bell in 20 years. It’s taken 25.

This is the archetypal east Cambs village Greene King tastefully refurbished all-rounder, with a soundtrack of Supertramp and Toto (that one).

The first thing you hear is;

“Stroke my belly make me feel happy“.  Oh it’s a chihuahua he’s talking to..

The GBG has no interest in the Bell, and the Bell has no interest in the GBG.

IPA and Landlord (with paper clip which comically falls off the pump), just like in Waterbeach or Tottenham.

The Neck Oil is off, so Mrs RM gets the Camden, which half the pub is drinking. Is Guinness off then ?

Mrs RM delights in saying “Do one, Dryanuary” on Instagram, though elsewhere Si and Jim and Will are probably on pub 7  already.

The Landlord just tastes weird, alternately dry and sweet (NBSS 2). But I do have a cold, so Discourse will consider my scores null and void anyway.

But the Bell is a community melting pot with young Luke (him again) Littlers playing darts, couples talking couple stuff (weeds, mostly) and it’s packed on New Year’s Day.

And when a young fella hop skips and jumps a single step to the bar as the first notes of Huey Lewis’s “The Power Of Love” comes on reminds me why I drag myself round pubs.