retiredmartin

January 2025. Waterbeach.

A slow start, but having caught up entirely on New Year’s Eve I now have reports on FOUR (4) pubs to bring you. None of them will change the world, or allow me to apply pink Stabilo marker to the Good book,

but, unless you’re BRAPA, there’s more to life than marker pen.

And, with the best will in the world, I hope there’s a bit more to life in 2025 than the pubs of Cambridgeshire, but there is an appeal to surveying the flow and tide of the Sun throughout the seasons.

What is immediately obvious is that while the Public on the left has its staunch regulars, you’ll never see the same customers twice in the lounge. Except on Thursday Quiz Nights.

Just before Christmas I met my octogenarian lay preacher friend in there (“beer’s better, but there’s jazz across the road”), last week we sat aside of two middle aged blokes discussing a chap who’d apparently been to all the pubs in the Beer Guide*, and tonight we had a couple playing board games with their noisy four year old.

“Shhh” says Mum, “that man’s come out for a quiet pint“.

“I just want you to take your parents out to the pub; you be as noisy as you like“.

It was lovely to see them using the 3rd space; he wasn’t that noisy.

They (not Tommy, 4), were on Madri, I had the last of the Winter Belgian Blue. After a weird Woodforde’s seasonal, this cask from outer Sheffield was superbly cool and chewy (NBSS 4).

I stopped for a second, another Greene King Winter Ale. Look at the head on that beer (top), a scummy coating that shouts “chewy”. I don’t have a clue about the mechanics of beer but that’s what I want beer to look like.

And Sheffield Hatter, who does understand the mechanics of beer, will know what these lacings mean;

*No idea