May 2025. Derby.
I’d already dragged Will off the approved route, but with barely 15 minutes in the Exeter we felt confident that a sprint to the backstreet Furnace would allow us to catch up with reprimand and suspension of Old Codger privileges.
But the sight of Stafford Paul sprinting towards the Five Lamps suggested something amiss. Perhaps the decoration in the Furnace ?
Or more likely, the absence of a recognisable beer on the bar ?
Certainly, a pleasant enough pub, not unduly mucked about with by Shiny Brewery (though it’s now free).
I was going to have the Caramel Custard Doughnut Milk Stout, of course I was, even though “A man should not go into Shiny beer land and not take of the Shiny ale“, as Samuel Johnson might have said in 1655.
But then a voice spake from the bench seats, Pete from Worcester I think, urging us to try some weird thing on the left of the bar,
and it was gross (1.5). Tellingly, there were no Untappd check-in at the pub, so I’ll never know what it was. Once again, our old friend “Too Many Beers” to blame in a pub empty apart from us
“I never said it was GOOD” said Pete. Too late, Pete.
retiredmartin 
Not the decoration but the sight of a Caramel Custard Doughnut Milk Stout had me sprinting towards the Five Lamps. That’s what can happen beyond seventy.
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You had the right idea.
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Sprinting, Paul?
Pretty good for your seventies, but I managed a couple of hundred metres the other day too.
Under your circumstances I’d have done it on my hands and knees if that was all that I could do though.
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Yes Etu, I can still walk seven miles to Penkridge or 10½ to Rugeley ( bus or train back after lunchtime though ). I put that down to over fifty years of proper beer as part of a healthy balanced diet and regular exercise, albeit mainly walking, cycling when I was young, to or from pubs.
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It was Shiny 4Wood, what I think of as the cardboard-y, dank beer that no one in their right mind would have suggested drinking. We should have just followed Paul up the road, though admittedly he was going quite fast.
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He’s a leader when it comes to tracking down pubs.
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We sent a search party out for Paul en route to The Furnace but it turns out he was chilling on the phone under a flyover of sorts!
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It was a phone call from my wife, and I could just hear her beneath but not besides the flyover. Derby never used to have so much traffic.
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Private Eye shows its worth again here
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