Mercurial Margate

Good though a fortnight in France was, I’m sure you will agree I had earned the right to a night in Kent, and a Good Beer Guide tick. In Margate to be precise, which is now an exciting mix of delightful and distressed. The GBG target was the Laughing Barrel, a walk along the cliff……

Skye’s the Limit

I left you in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, about to board an early morning ferry back to Ullapool, where we had left the car overnight. On a glorious morning, our first stop was the Shieldaig Bar, one of seven omissions in the covid-interrupted 2020 Guide Beer Guide. The setting is sublime. On the……

Lovely Stornoway?

The late Calum Kennedy – a big name in the Outer Hebrides – once wrote a song called ‘Lovely Stornoway’. The satirical Daily Gael had its own take on this. Kennedy had his own show on Grampian TV and was once affronted by a BBC documentary that followed him on a doom-laden tour in an……

Celebrations in Kosovo

Day 3 of our tri-country crawl saw us travel from Tirana into Kosovo, an ancient territory that was known as the Kingdom of Dardania in the 4th Century BC. In 2008, following war in the Balkan region, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. The national flag is unusual in that it depicts a map of……

Albania Mania

Albania’s capital Tirana feels something akin to a southern Italian city. It is smart, shabby, chaotic, noisy, calm and exciting in turn, whilst driving is not for the faint-hearted. We were told that until a decade ago traffic lights were seen as purely ornamental. Somehow it mostly seems to work. As one of our group……

Killin me Softly

Killin is a beautifully situated village. The peaks of Ben More and Stobinian lie to the west, Glen Lyon and Ben Lawers to the north and Loch Tay to the east. Glasgow is 62 miles to the south. It is also something of a real ale hotspot though the once reliable Coach House is now……

Dial M for Montenegro

Last month our group of six embarked on a mission to watch football in three Balkan countries on successive days, in Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo. We arrived in Tirana via Luton in time to get our pre-booked transport to Podgorica, capital of Montenegro. It’s a 3 hour drive plus half that time again to cross……

Hard Rock in Derbyshire

Us pub tickers believe the Good Beer Guide exists for our sole benefit and therefore all pubs should require to be open 24/7, 365 days a year. In turn we would reward their dedication with a quick half. The reality is, of course, somewhat different and some open so infrequently that the logistics of visiting……

Finessing Furness

Two trips to Cumbria to report, inside a month. One for Madame Luna’s birthday and another to see Barrow stave off relegation to non-league football (which would surely have sufficed as a birthday treat in itself). The first trip tidied up Unsworth’s Yard in charming Cartmel and saw a possible pre-emptive strike at the Grasmere……

Sofia (Part 2: The Football)

I don’t usually write a football-based blog but the stadiums were went to in Bulgaria were remarkable monuments to a different era, some of which features at the Museum of Socialist Art. It has three elements- sculpture, paintings and propaganda films. It’s near GM Dmitrov metro and a stylish shopping centre and is highly recommended.……