“Living Next Door To Alice”. “Alice?”

March 2025. Marton. Lincolnshire.

Right, some inroads made into East Yorkshire, time to head back to tricky Lincolnshire, perhaps BRAPA’s favourite county.

Marton, which keeps autocorrecting to the more famous “Martin” (there’s one of those south of Lincoln) feels tiny, because it is.

747 souls straggled along the A156, with a wobbly church, a post box, and a view of Cottam power station (R.I.P.) over the Trent.

Oh, and a modernist crematorium just up the road at Lea Fields that I loved,

but which seems to have divided opinion in West Lindsey.

As will the Ingleby Arms, Marton’s village pub now the Black Swan is a guest house.

You expect surviving village pubs to be food-driven and twee, but the Ingleby bucks that trend by opening at 3pm, being distinctly back to basics, and resolutely of the “one pump is plenty” persuasion.

It’s always slightly disheartening to travel miles (a painful trip from Lea station) for Sheffield beer,

but the Farmer’s is a triumph of presentation, if a tad sharp.

Hard to score, and I’m not being diplomatic. Sometimes, just sometimes, Retired Martin does not have all the answers.

I didn’t know the track playing either, and Shazam hasn’t reached Gainsborough yet, so I got the landlord to check the 8 track cartridge.

“Suzy Quattro and Chris Norman“

“Oh, the guy from Smokie“

“Who ?”

“You’re too young!  You know, Living Next Door To Alice”

I think he only knew the version drunk Irish hen parties sing on hen parties, you know.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

8 thoughts on ““Living Next Door To Alice”. “Alice?””

  2. Tremendous photos of the power station. I hope those cooling towers are Grade I listed. We don’t want to lose them.

    Wouldn’t they make lovely brewery taps?

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    1. I remember clearly the building of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station – a similar design – in the 1960s, a big part of the horizon seen from my bedroom window.

      It inspired a great, optimistic feeling of can-do hope for the future, as did so much back then.

      I know that we must reduce drastically CO2 emissions, but I feel an indefeasible upwelling of sadness whenever I drive past it on the M1, and see the chimney smokeless, and the cooling towers vapourless.

      We could at least mothball it, for when Vlad’s antics create a contingency? (Not that he’s the only one any more.)

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      1. Rugeley’s were demolished a couple of years ago.
        Locals had wanted one retained as a leisure facility for climbers but it didn’t happen.
        Whenever I go to Rugeley, most recently eleven days ago, I hear in a pub or two “When I was at Lea Hall …..”

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      3. Lea Hall colliery certainly was at 1300 feet which was 6½ times deeper than Marstons’s well in Burton. A trip underground at Rugeley was certainly an evening to remember.

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      1. You certainly have. I don’t like Farmers Blonde at the best of times, but especially not when it’s “sharp”!

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