When My Feet Go Through the Door

In a League of their own

2026-10-15T00:59:36.173-07:00

The Rugby League World Cup kicks off in Australia today, although you'd never know it from the lack of interest shown in the event by the mainstream media. The BBC has come under fire after it didn't even bother to bid for the rights to broadcast the matches live, which have now ended up with Irish subscription channel Premier Sports (political pressure from the minister responsible for media and sport, Lisa Nandy, who is also the MP for Wigan, led to a last minute deal whereby the BBC will put highlights on their iPlayer, where no one who isn't already a fan of the game will see them).

The BBC probably thinks that rugby league is a Northern sport that no one outside the M62 corridor is really interested in, but even if that's true it's no reason not to broadcast matches. With the possible exception of football, all sports are minority interests, including ones that the BBC spends a lot of time and money covering like rugby union and tennis. You can't help thinking that there is some class bias at work here, with BBC executives allocating resources to sports that they themselves follow.

Between 1999 and 2023, the BBC broadcast a weekly, hour long highlights show of Super League matches. That was then replaced by a three year deal to broadcast fifteen matches a season live, a contract which has now expired and is apparently not going to be renewed (as with the World Cup, a highlights package will be put on the iPlayer instead). That leaves them with live coverage of the Challenge Cup and England autumn international Test matches which are played outside World Cup years. If they are cut too, you might well see a sudden drop in TV licence renewals across a swathe of Northern England.

Gone for a Burton

2026-10-09T00:48:48.854-07:00

Carlsberg announced yesterday that it will shut Marston's Brewery in Burton on Trent, where it produces cask beers including the flagship bitter Pedigree and Draught Bass, which it contract brews for AB InBev, next summer. Where those beers will now end up being brewed is anyone's guess.

I drank quite a bit of Pedigree, and the occasional pint of Draught Bass, when I was a student in Stoke on Trent in the early nineties, the former mostly in the Victoria pub, opposite Stoke City's ground of the same name, after meetings in the Labour Party offices round the corner. In the 2010s, I regularly drank Draught Bass at the Unicorn in Manchester city centre, the pub where the Honourable Order of Bass Drinkers was founded in the late sixties, when Manchester Jazz Society met there, and in 2013 went to Burton on Trent where the Coopers Tavern serves it straight from the cask.

AB InBev belatedly started an advertising drive last year to promote Draught Bass, which has since seen a modest uptick in sales, including amongst young people, paralleling the much wider popularity of Draught Guinness with that age group. Let's hope that they can find another brewery with the capacity to produce enough of it to meet the continuing and deserved demand for this iconic beer.

Spinning mildly in Manchester

2026-08-07T00:43:49.788-07:00

I went to the Spinners Rest in Ancoats for the first time last night as Joseph Holt's Brewery chose it as the pub where their award for the best mild of this year's Mild Magic trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, would be presented.

An early nineteenth century inn which later became a keg only Irish pub called the Shamrock, and was once allegedly frequented by members of the Quality Street Gang, Holt's bought it in 2019 and reopened it this summer after an extensive refurbishment, with a new name connected to the streets of former textile mills in the Ancoats area just north of Manchester city centre.

It's pretty much what you'd expect from a Holt's refurbishment, with lots of dark wooden panelling, Victorian style lamps and leaded glass, and they've clearly spent a lot of money on the place, something reflected in the slightly higher than normal prices which you often find in their improved pubs compared to the more basic community locals they're known for throughout Manchester and Salford.

There were four cask beers on the bar, bitter, mild, Two Hoots golden ale and a seasonal IPA. I tried the first two and found both of them to be in good form.

There's also a small beer garden at the side of the pub, where last night lots of young people were sitting outside in, as they were at trestle tables in the now pedestrianised apart from a bike lane Stevenson Square which I walked through en route to Ancoats from Piccadilly station, giving the city centre something of a continental air.

RIP Humphrey Smith

2026-07-01T02:54:00.000-07:00

I raised a glass of Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale last night to the memory of Humphrey Smith, the owner of the brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, who has died at the age of 81.

He was a complex and controversial figure, as alluded to in this obituary of him.

I like the brewery's beers, in cask, bottle and keg, and their pubs (the ones that are still open that is). I'm not sure I would have liked the man himself though had I ever met him, and I certainly didn't like the way he treated his pub managers.

Let's hope that those who inherit his empire run it in a less feudal manner, and without some of his idiosyncratic rules, while retaining the traditional feel of the pubs and quality and reasonable prices of the beers.

These are a few of my favourite things

2026-05-18T00:50:30.136-07:00

This weekend s Guardian had a list of the best hundred novels, compiled from top tens submitted by writers and critics (I've read thirty eight of them).

I thought I'd compile my own top ten. It was much harder than I expected, and I could easily have added another ten novels to the list. Those that failed to make this most difficult of cuts will have to be summarised by the name of their authors, in no particular order: Albert Camus, George Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Graham Greene.

So anyway, here's my top ten.

1. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

2. Günter Grass, Dog Years

3. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

4. Franz Kafka, The Castle

5. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge

6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

8. Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell

9. Hermann Hesse, The Prodigy

10. Saul Bellow, Herzog

I'm aware that the list is heavily slanted towards twentieth century European literature, and at the top end especially towards magical realism.

Snookered by the black

2026-05-02T01:17:00.000-07:00

I watched the fourteenth frame of the World Snooker Championship semi final between Northern Irish player Mark Allen and Chinese youngster Wu Yize yesterday teatime.

The black ball ended up hanging over the bottom right corner pocket with eight reds clustered around it. Normally the players would agree to a rerack and start the frame again, but with a thirty point lead on the scoreboard Allen declined to do so, and the referee was apparently unable to force him to, so for almost an hour the players clipped the reds or played off touching balls, sending the cue ball back to the baulk end of the table without potting anything. Eventually Allen knocked in the black with a deliberate foul shot and Wu went on to win the frame which lasted an hour and forty minutes, a record since the World Championship moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1977.

It reminded me of the bit in the Patrick Hamilton novel The Plains of Cement where a young boy drives the barmaid in a London pub who's looking after him to distraction by showing her how to play endless cannons in billiards.

There have unsurprisingly been calls for the rules to be changed so that such a frame can never happen again, but the audience who witnessed it live seemed to enjoy the spectacle, as did I watching it on TV, and it's not the only sport where things can technically go on indefinitely: baseball and tennis don't have a clock, and penalty shootouts in football are unlimited too. If it happened all the time it might become a problem, but every few years just adds to the variety of the game.

An Alt Alternative

2026-04-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

Two of the beer bloggers I read regularly, Ron Pattinson and Martin Taylor, have both been to the Rhineland recently and I've been enjoying their reports from some of my favourite Düsseldorf and Cologne pubs.

That led me to this piece which fellow beer bloggers Boak and Bailey wrote about Altbier, the beer served in Düsseldorf brewpubs, back in 2008, the year before I first went there, in which they concluded: "To recreate the Alt effect at home: Get a nice brown bitter that you like, chill it for a couple of hours, and pour it carelessly into a 250ml tumbler so that it eventually settles down to half beer, half head. We tried it — it works. A good alt is very like a cold, super bitter English ale. In our humble opinion, this better recreates the alt experience than buying a tired bottle of boring Diebels from your local specialist beer emporium."

I bought a few bottles of Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale the other day so tried it with one of them, and it definitely worked: I almost felt like I was drinking a glass of beer in a Düsseldorf brewpub, albeit one at the maltier end of the Altbier spectrum (think Schumacher or Schlüssel rather than Uerige or Füchschen).

Altbier is usually, and rightly, compared to a British style pale ale, being hoppy, copper coloured and top fermented, but in Düsseldorf they often describe it to English speaking visitors as a dark beer (which is it compared to Pils, the standard beer in northern Germany). The maltier and darker examples also line up in taste and colour with a brown ale.

Some Manchester music myths (and a few facts too)

2026-02-02T01:15:00.000-08:00

On 7th May 1964, Granada TV filmed a programme of performances by touring US blues musicians including Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Cousin Joe Pleasant, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the disused Wilbraham Road railway station in Whalley Range, south Manchester, which they dubbed Chorltonville and mocked up to look like a Southern style railroad halt, complete with a crate of chickens and tethered goat.

The show, The Blues and Gospel Train, is now on YouTube and clips from it regularly pop up in both blues and local history pages that I follow on Facebook, together with the same myths endlessly repeated before being debunked.

The programme was filmed at Chorlton-cum-Hardy station

This is understandable for a few reasons. Granada called the station Chorltonville (an actual area of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the south Manchester suburb which borders Whalley Range) and Chorlton-cum-Hardy station, now a stop on the South Manchester Line of the Metrolink tram system, is on Wilbraham Road, a mile or so west of Wilbraham Road station, and famously mentioned in a Flanders and Swann song.

The show was part of the American Folk Blues Festival

The American Folk Blues Festival ran throughout the sixties, bringing US blues musicians, including some who appeared on the show at Wilbraham Road station, to European audiences in theatres and concert halls. It was organised by German jazz fans Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau with Chess Records producer Willie Dixon a key contact in Chicago. The tour the musicians were on in 1964 was called the Blues and Gospel Caravan and was promoted by Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein.

Members of the Rolling Stones were in the audience

By 1964 the Rolling Stones were an established act and were themselves on tour when the Granada TV show was filmed. The confusion seems to stem from their having travelled up to Manchester from London two years earlier to see the 1962 American Folk Blues Festival gig at the Free Trade Hall (where the musicians from the Wilbraham Road show also performed the following night in 1964).

The audience was racially segregated

Granada TV set up the filming with the artists on one platform and the mostly student and white audience, who had travelled there on a special train from Manchester Central Station, seated on another opposite it. The idea that it was racially segregated is usually voiced by Americans who think they're seeing an actual railroad station in the US South, where Jim Crow laws still segregated blacks and whites in the mid sixties, rather than a disused station mocked up to look like one in the south Manchester suburbs. Muddy Waters is playing on the opposite platform when the audience gets off the train at the start of the show, before crossing the track to rejoin the other artists, and there are photos from the tour of the black musicians happily mingling backstage with their starstruck teenage white fans.

And now for a few facts.

The gospel singer Sister Rosetta Thorpe, arguably the star of the show, changed her opening number from the, very appropriate, This Train to Didn't It Rain when she saw the unseasonably wet Manchester weather (pianist Cousin Joe Pleasant, who helps her down from a horse drawn carriage and leads her along the platform, had just performed in a torrential downpour, which gave the Granada sound technicians a few problems).

Filming had to be stopped on several occasions to let freight trains which still ran along the Fallowfield Loop Line to pass through the station.

Johnny Hamp who produced the show for Granada TV already had contacts in the rail industry from filming Little Eva singing her hit The Locomotion with a train background at the Longsight depot in south Manchester in February 1963.

The tour was managed by the twenty-one year old future record producer Joe Boyd. He describes it as his first and still best job in the music industry.

Beers of the Year

2026-01-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone, hope it's a good one for you all.

Just been doing some number crunching of my 2025 beer scores on the CAMRA website. I went to 54 pubs last year, 26 in Stockport and 28 in Manchester, and submitted 99 beer scores.

Ninety of them were 3s (Good), with only a single 1 (Poor) and six 2s (Average). I gave two beers a 4 (Very Good/Excellent), Vocation Bread and Butter Pale Ale at Ladybarn Social Club and Thornbridge Jaipur IPA at the Angel on Stockport Marketplace, so hats off to them.

Cheers, and hope to see some of you at the bar this year.

Draught Bass at the reopened Crown Inn, Stockport, in August

Books of the Year

2025-12-19T01:38:00.000-08:00

Or what I read in 2025.

Headbirths, Or The Germans Are Dying Out/Too Far Afield by Günter Grass

Two later, and critically less regarded, novels by my favourite German writer, with which I completed my reading of his works, a somewhat sad moment given I've been enjoying them since my late teens.

West by Carys Davies

A slightly surreal noir Western, with some echoes of True Grit, which I read straight through in an afternoon.

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant

I was led to this after reading his earlier novel The Pawnbroker, which was filmed with Rod Steiger as the title character. Another story about Jewish-African American relations in New York, and human redemption, it has a quietly elegaic ending.

A Life's Music by Andrei Makine

This novella about a concert pianist fleeing Stalin's purges in the late thirties is both lyrical and of unusual literary origin, being by an exiled Russian writer who wrote it in French before it was translated into English.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. I know the subject matter, a crew from different countries orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, is unavoidably repetitive, but I still found this unnecessarily so, and was bored long before I finished it.

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

I read this surreal short story after I learnt that it begins in the Stoke town of Fenton, where I lived as a student in the early nineties.

Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift

The first of these short stories, about a British National Servicemen attempting to discover the fate of his Jewish relatives in fifties West Germany, is by far the best. The others are all a bit contrived, and some derivative of his other works.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

One of the great unread novels, which despite its length is actually very readable (I finished it in about a week).

James by Percival Everett

A retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the fleeing slave Jim which won this year's Pullitzer Prize.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee

Some unpublished short stories and pieces of non fiction from the early sixties by the writer of To Kill A Mockingbird. Most are very insubstantial, but the first, set in her native Alabama rather than New York where she then lived, offers an early glimpse of her later masterpiece.

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Another collection of short stories by the writer once described as India's Günter Grass. There's a sense of time running out and things coming full circle here, especially in the first two stories set in his home city of Bombay.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An ethereal short story about unrequited love set in the nighttime streets of St. Petersburg which I read after seeing in a newspaper that it had somehow become one of the year's bestselling books.

RIP Salford

2025-12-04T01:23:00.000-08:00

In September 2007, the last time Salford rugby league club was relegated, I stood in the Shed at the Willows for the final home game of the season, a loss against Warrington. They were already down before kickoff but there was still a decent crowd in the ground and hope for the future, justifiably as they came straight back up after a season in the second division.

In September 2011, I stood on the same terrace for Salford's last ever game at the ground, a loss against French side Catalans, before they moved to a new 12,000 capacity stadium in Barton-on-Irwell, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal between the high level bridge and Barton aerodrome. At the time, Salford were getting attendances of around 5,000 and it was hoped that this could be doubled to nearer 10,000. In fact, they dropped to about 3,000, many of those away fans arriving on coaches off the nearby junction of the M60 motorway.

For home fans. the ground was in the wrong place, far from Salford's traditional areas of support and difficult to get to, and especially away from, by car, let alone on foot or public transport. Only a hardcore remained and new and casual fans were put off going, if they even knew where the stadium was. Despite that, Salford made it to a Grand Final at Old Trafford in 2019, Wembley for a first Challenge Cup Final since the late sixties in 2020, and last season finished fourth.

This season has been a disaster on and off the pitch. The new owner, a Swiss based businessman, seemingly only bought the club so he could acquire the stadium and land around it for development, and then lost interest when the council withdrew from negotiations over those plans. Wages have gone unpaid and there has been an exodus of players, coaches and other staff, fixtures were unfulfilled and points deducted before the inevitable relegation.

Yesterday in the High Court in London, a winding up petition was granted to HM Revenue and Customs over unpaid taxes, bringing to an end a club which traced its history back to 1873, when it formed in Hulme, Manchester, before moving across the Irwell to Salford.

No doubt a phoenix club will be formed, and Salford council will be keen for it to move into the stadium that they still own, but the real question is whether they can field thirteen players for the start of the Championship season just six weeks from now.

Best of the Fest

2025-09-20T00:50:00.000-07:00

Oktoberfest starts in Munich today with the tapping of the first barrel of beer by the city's mayor. Breweries, specialist beer shops, online retailers and supermarkets here have all been promoting Bavarian-style lagers in the run-up to it so I picked up some from RedWillow in Macclesfield.

Festbier Märzen (5.6%)

Named after the month of March when it was originally brewed, malty, medium strong Märzen is the beer traditionally served at Oktoberfest, with Festbier being the pale version of it.

Sweetish, with an almost amber, fuller colour than I expected. Quite a bitter aftertaste.

Kellerbier (4.3%)

Kellerbier ("cellar beer") is an unfiltered lager, normally served on draught and particularly associated with Franconia in northern Bavaria. It is probably the nearest German equivalent to cask beer, especially when dispensed by gravity from wooden barrels.

Large, tight head. Very clean malt taste, balanced by a dry hoppiness. Golden colour, slightly cloudy with low carbonation.

I enjoyed both these beers and would drink them again. I'm also hoping to return one day to the beer gardens of Munich, which I lasted visited with a, sadly now late, mate back in 2010.

Crown Inn glory

2025-08-16T00:52:00.000-07:00

The Crown in Stockport reopened yesterday after a lengthy, and much needed, refurbishment by its new owners, the father and son who also run the Petersgate Tap between the station and marketplace, so I popped down last night to have a look.

Fifteen or so years ago, the Crown was Stockport's premier pub for cask beer, a multi handpump Victorian boozer beneath the town's famous railway viaduct which, despite not being the closest to the ground, often attracted away fans when their teams played at Edgeley Park (I was in there once on a Saturday dinnertime when a coachload of Southampton fans, whose side were briefly in the third tier, turned up having heard about its reputation for well kept real ale). But then the longtime landlord retired and the place began to drift a bit, a slow side into general shabbiness and average beer that in the last few years has seen a dizzying succession of short term licensees and sudden, unexplained closures.

Thankfully the pub is now in good hands again, with a smartened up look and cask range that I'm sure will get it back into the Good Beer Guide. It also now has Draught Bass as a permanent beer on the bar, which was flying out last night (they were already on their third cask of it!).

Roll Out the Barrel

2025-08-11T00:55:00.000-07:00

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark.

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

2025-08-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

For the last few months on a Sunday night, Talking Pictures TV has been showing episodes of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a seventies variety show supposedly coming live from a Manchester working men's club, but actually filmed at the studios of Granada TV on a midweek afternoon (the audience seems to consist largely of pensioners, no doubt drawn by the trays with pints of keg bitter on them being constantly filled at the bar and carried round the room by the waitresses).

The first thing to say is that most of the turns aren't very good. Bernard Manning as compere confirms that not only wasn't he very funny but he couldn't sing either, crooning in a strange cod Las Vegas lounge style. The two things that make it watchable are the comedian Colin Crompton, as the stereotypical committee chairman who makes humorous announcements between the acts, and the stars from beyond the Northern club circuit whom the legendary Granada producer Johnnie Hamp somehow managed to attract, like Howard Keel and Karl Denver. There is also occasionally some jazz from the traditional end of the genre (Kenny Ball, George Melly).

Some ITV regions, especially those in the South, apparently refused to show the programme until the early hours, deeming it too broad for their allegedly more sophisticated audiences, and you can sort of see their point. If you want to know why variety died, here is your answer.

Beer and blues in the new Berlin

2025-06-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

A river runs through it

2025-06-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Mild about Manchester

2025-05-06T00:48:00.000-07:00

I went into Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon and completed my sticker card for Mild Magic, an annual event organised by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to promote mild ale.

I usually get off to a decent start by going on the pub crawl held to launch it, but this year my attempt to join it was, er, derailed by a freight train which caught fire and shut the Manchester Airport line for several hours.

In the end, I managed to get to sixteen pubs, about half of them tied houses of local breweries Holt's and Hydes (who sponsor the event) and the others a mixture of micropubs and Wetherspoons. Seven were in the city centre, five in the SK8 postcode area, and four in south Manchester (along the Metrolink line of that name from East Didsbury to Withington).

The beer quality was generally good, with just one poor and another returned as undrinkable. I voted for the Bank Top Dark Mild I had at the Wobbly Stamp in Cheadle as the best mild, and the City Arms in Manchester as the best pub.

Agatha at Abney

2025-03-29T02:00:00.000-07:00

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location.

Supping in the seventies

2025-02-07T01:21:00.004-08:00

I've just finished reading Keg, an overview of British brewing in the seventies by Ron Pattinson.

I was born at the start of the decade so only have fragmentary memories of the mid to late seventies, but certain things continued into and up to the end of the eighties, when I began drinking in pubs.

The consolidation of British brewing in the sixties into the Big Six national groups (Allied, Bass, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys and Whitbread) with their large tied estates only began to break up after the introduction of the Beer Orders in 1989 - the first pub I drank in as a teenager was a Whitbread house, originally built by Manchester brewery Chester's and acquired by them when they bought Threlfalls in 1967, which finally shut last summer. The lack of choice and imposition of overpriced keg and bland national cask brands by them was a major factor in the formation of the Campaign for Real Ale in 1971 and the Big Six became their primary target throughout the seventies and eighties, although the fight against them ultimately backfired as they all subsequently sold up to global brewers with even less interest in cask beer or transformed themselves into non-brewing hotel, leisure and pub companies.

The seventies also saw lager's rise to dominance in the draught beer market, with the section on it here a snapshot of the longer, and fascinating, version in another of Ron's books, Lager.

Things which Ron mentions that I recall from the late eighties and early nineties, and which have either now disappeared or become far less common, include outside toilets, afternoon closing, drink driving, bottle-conditoned Guinness, milk stout, bottled beer mixed with draught, and not having a problem being served under the legal drinking age of 18 (the first place I drank draught beer as a 16 year old was a Labour club, after joining the Young Socialists in the 1987 General Election campaign, and which somewhat ironically is now a children's nursery. Around the same time, a couple of mates and myself sipped halves of Boddies bitter at dinnertime in a rather rough Salford estate pub, on a break from a Sixth Form thing across the road at the university, in our school uniforms).

Smoking was of course ubiquitous and unremarked upon in pubs - the idea that it would become illegal within a couple of decades would have seemed incredible to most drinkers had it crossed our minds (I had an old coat that I only wore to my very smoky local and which stank of tobacco until I hung it out to air the next day). Other things in pubs that seemed immovable back then included men selling seafood on a Friday night and the football newspaper (pink in Manchester) on a Saturday evening, football pools coupon collectors and darts boards. You still occasionally saw older women having bottles and jugs filled with draught beer to take home. I'm not sure what the reaction to that request would be now, or to heavy drinking during working hours (Friday afternoons at Stockport social security office, where I worked in my late twenties and early thirties, were never the most productive after our extended dinnertime session at the Robbies pub round the corner).

I also recall as a kid in the seventies seeing lots of home brewing kits for sale in high street shops, the popularity of which was no doubt linked to the rising cost of draught beer in pubs, illustrated in the book by a handy table showing the average price of a pint of bitter increasing from 10p at the start of the decade to 34p at the end of it (Holt's cask bitter cost 79p a pint when I first drank it in 1989, and is now between £3 and £4.50 depending on the area the pub is in and how much the brewery has spent refurbishing it).

Trump Towers Over America

2025-01-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States in Washington tomorrow, having previously served as the 45th in that office. American socialists came under massive pressure from the wider liberal left to vote for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in last November's presidential election, with most understandably succumbing to it, something I still think was neither necessary nor helpful to their long-term goals for a number of reasons.

1. The Democratic party is the major obstacle to the US labour movement establishing some kind of pole, even initially a small one, around which it could organise independent political representation for itself. Within the party's ranks, the unions inevitably play second fiddle to the lobbying of the corporate interests which fund it, and are either sidelined in policy terms or become enmeshed in unprincipled deal making, much as the British labour movement was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Liberal party.

2. Harris is not particularly radical for a Democrat. It would be a different case if someone like Bernie Sanders, standing on an overtly pro-working class programme, had won the nomination.

3. The election was only really a contest in the seven swing states, all of which Trump won relatively easily in the end. Outside of them, socialists voting for Harris were either unnecessarily adding their ballot papers to an already decisive pile for her in blue states, or wasting them in red ones.

4. Trump is undoubtedly an authoritarian right-wing nationalist whose rule will lead to numerous reactionary decisions, especially in foreign affairs, immigration and tackling climate change, but his inauguration does not signal a fascist takeover in which future elections are cancelled, political parties banned, unions suppressed, meetings and demos violently broken up by stormtroopers and basic civil liberties curtailed, not least because of the federal system which grants US states considerable rights, and if it did voting for a Democratic candidate and advocating that others do likewise would not be an adequate response to stop that threat.

Books of the Year

2024-12-27T01:22:00.000-08:00

I read a dozen books this year, mostly in short bursts rather than spread across the twelve months, including a few I've been meaning to get round to for a long time.

The Hard Life/At Swim Two Birds/The Dalkey Archive/The Third Policeman/The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien

I've read quite a bit of Flann O'Brien before, especially his Myles na Gopaleen columns in the Irish Times, and his novels are an extension of those, mixing Gaelic mythology, surrealism, philosophy and wit, including the archetypal Dublin character The Brother. Naturally pubs and boozing feature quite heavily too.

The Dead by James Joyce

Back to Dublin again for this long and ethereal short story which I wrote about here.

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

Another long short story, about two French army officers fighting a series of duels throughout the Napoleonic Wars, which was made into a memorable film by Ridley Scott in the late seventies.

Catherine, or The Bower by Jane Austen

I thought I'd read everything by Jane Austen until I came across this unfinished teenage novel by her. It's often included amongst her juvenilia, but the themes and settings are much closer to her later published works.

Munichs by David Peace

I've read Peace's other two football novels, The Damned United about Brian Clough's six week spell at Leeds and Red or Dead about Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, but this is understandably much darker than either, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in the offices beneath the stands at Old Trafford, the rainy streets of Manchester and the snowbound Munich hospital and hotel where the survivors of the 1958 air crash are taken.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I read this story about a young Indian man's encounters with the Buddha and lifelong journey of self discovery after seeing an interview with former Chelsea and now US women's football coach Emma Hayes in which she said that she gives it to new players when they join the squad.

My Century/The Call of the Toad by Günter Grass

Two later, and less regarded, works by my favourite German writer, although, like his Crabwalk which I read last year, I enjoyed them both in different ways, the former a fragmented series of snapshots spanning each year in twentieth century German history and the latter a heartfelt piece about Polish-German reconciliation set in his native Baltic city, Danzig/Gdansk.

Winter Warmer Wanderings

2024-12-06T01:02:00.000-08:00

I completed Winter Warmer Wander, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's annual celebration of strong ales, stouts and festive beers, somewhat ahead of schedule this year, three weeks before the end of the event, which runs from mid November to late December, consists of collecting stickers from pubs to win prizes, and is sponsored by Stockport family brewery Robinson's, who are also celebrating the 125th anniversary of their strong ale Old Tom.

I went to twelve pubs (four in Manchester, four in Cheadle Hulme, two in Cheadle and two in Stockport), about half of them tied houses of local family breweries (Holt's, Lees, Robinson's) and the rest a mixture of micropubs and free houses selling beers from further afield, mostly those of North Midlands breweries Thornbridge and Titanic.

I drank more stouts than strong ales, almost all in halves due to their strength and price, although the latter were amongst my favourite beers on this year's event. I managed to call at some regular haunts, the Chiverton Tap next to Cheadle Hulme station and the City Arms in Manchester city centre, but also revisited a few pubs I probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, including the surprisingly pubby Red Lion in Cheadle and the Pointing Dog in Cheadle Hulme, a far flung spot on the southern border of Stockport for most participants on the event, but fortunately only a couple of miles walk for me.

A couple of beers from yesteryear

2024-11-04T01:27:00.000-08:00

I picked up a couple of beers from the supermarket the other day which were a common sight in pubs when I was younger, Newcastle Brown Ale and Mackeson's Stout, both of which have now become something of a "ghost brand": still produced, albeit in much lower volumes than before, but never advertised or promoted.

I occasionally drank Newcastle Brown Ale as a student in the early nineties, when it became something of a cult beer and was regularly stocked by student union bars (it also pops up in most episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, rereuns of which I've been watching on That's TV). Since then, Heineken has bought Scottish & Newcastle, demolished the former Federation Brewery in Gateshead where the beer had ended up, and moved production to John Smith's in North Yorkshire. I'm not sure if it's the move from Tyneside to Tadcaster, but it seems much smoother and blander now, although still with a decent head and a slightly sulphurous aftertaste that is quite appealing and reminded me of the famous "Burton snatch" you get in the pale ales brewed there, Draught Bass and Marston's Pedigree.

The first pub in drank in as a teenager, a Whitbread house that finally closed its doors this summer, stocked bottles of Mackeson's Stout., a beer they had acquired from a brewery in Kent which they bought, and eventually shut down, turning it into a national brand (the dairy churn on the label of the bottle indicated that it contained lactose, a sugar derived from milk). Milk stout is traditionally associated with either pregnant women and nursing mothers, due to its supposed health properties, or older ladies, no doubt because of its low strength and sweetness. The gossipy trio who supped it in the snug of the Rovers Return in early episodes of Coronation Street fit the latter archetype, although it was also the favourite drink of one of my fellow teenage pubgoers, rather the bitter, lager, Guinness and cider everyone else ordered, and who regularly took bottles of it home with her. I quite enjoyed my first taste of it, which comes now out of a can rather than a bottle: a dark brown, rubyish colour similar to Guinness, a thick, off white head, an aroma of brown sugar, bit of a thin mouthfeel, and slightly roasty, not at all sweet really (I'm still on the look out for some Whitbread Gold Label barley wine so, like Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, I can make a Mackeson's and Gold Label black and tan).

Castle Kings of the Mild Frontier

2024-09-29T01:06:00.000-07:00

I went to the Castle in Macclesfield yesterday afternoon, which had been voted best pub of Mild Magic, the annual sticker trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, and extended to the former Cheshire silk town for the first time this year. The owner of the Black Country brewery Sarah Hughes was also there to pick up the best mild award for their 6% beer Dark Ruby.

I haven't been to the Castle for a decade, since when it's shut, changed hands and been refurbished. Having the same name, it always brings to my mind the final, unfinished, novel by Franz Kafka, especially as its historic multi room interior mirrors that of the village inn where the young surveyor arrives late on a winter night at the beginning of the book. The dark strong beer we were drinking wouldn't look out of place in Kafka's native Czech land of Bohemia either.

I've only been to the Beacon, the pub in Sedgley where it's brewed, once, back in 2012, but that too is something of a time capsule, especially the front room on the right where I sat, which is essentially unchanged since the twenties.