The Queen in Stockport

I happened to be in a pub in Stockport, meeting up with a few mates who I hadn't seen for a couple of years because of Covid, when the news came that the Queen had died, almost a fortnight ago now.

I knew when I left home to catch the train to Stockport that the Queen was seriously ill and that it was possible she might die in the next few hours, and wondered what would happen if she did – would the pub shut, or people sit silently over their drinks in a mournful atmosphere? – but in the end a bloke at the bar asked his mate if he thought they'd get the day off for the funeral and they laughed and things carried on pretty much as normal. Later, we walked back down the hill to the station and there were groups of people coming along Wellington Road in high spirits on an evening out, which would have been unthinkable seventy years ago I reckon.

Funnily enough, the only time I saw the Queen, quite by accident, was at Stockport station in 2004, when I was dropping some relatives off there and her train came in on the next platform - she was on her way to what was then the Royal Manchester School for the Deaf, and I to work as one of her civil servants at the social security office across the road, where, given my republican sympathies, the telling of my encounter with our employer was met with some mirth.

I'd travelled into Stockport on the train a couple of times before in the last few months, for the beer festival at the football ground and the evening at Ye Olde Vic to celebrate it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years, but on both occasions had left the station by the approach on the Edgeley side, so hadn't seen the new buildings around it or the bus interchange going up in the shell of the old one.

Ye Olde Vic: 21 not out

I went to Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley last night, for an evening on which Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA celebrated it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years in a row.

As I wrote here, after my first visit to it in 2015, for years I thought that when people talked about the derelict looking pub at the top of the approach behind Stockport station, they were referring to the imposing, but long closed, and now converted for other use, Blue Bell Hotel rather than Ye Olde Vic just down the hill.

It's actually only a few weeks since my last visit, having popped in for a pint en route to the station after Stockport Beer and Cider Festival at Edgeley Park, and its unique atmosphere of a street corner local largely frequented by regulars rather than destination pub visitors cum eclectic bric-à-brac emporium and the well-kept cask beer which has led to it long appearing in the Good Beer Guide were the same on both occasions.

Another draw last night was the presence on the bar of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild, the strong mild ale created by a widow of that name in 1921 that disappeared for thirty years until the recipe for it was rediscovered by her grandson in the late 80s, which, combined with a cheese and onion cob in its home at the Beacon Hotel, Sedgley, was one of the highlights of my holiday to the Black Country a decade ago.

Farewell Neighbours

The Australian soap Neighbours came to an end last night with a special hour-long finale.

I've been watching Neighbours since it started in the mid 80s, at first the dinnertime episode on a tiny TV in a classroom at secondary school, and then the teatime one in a shared student house in the early 90s (one of my lecture shy housemates always used to get up especially for it).

While ratings have inevitably dropped since their late 80s peak, the real reason that Channel 5 - who took over the show from the BBC in 2008 and underwrote its production since - has finally pulled the plug is that it's now cheaper for it to make its own programmes - like their inferior remake of All Creatures Great and Small - and then sell them to the US networks, rather than buying them in from elsewhere.

The appeal of Neighbours has always been that it's sunny, breeezy and light, a youthful, upbeat and optimistic contrast to, and escape from, the gloomy, divided Thatcherite Britain of the 80s and now, politics having come almost full circle, our post-Brexit fate of isolation and decline, and although the show became more issue-driven of late it never lost its balance of drama and comedy, and thankfully never descended to the unrelenting grimness of Eastenders or, having chosen to ape it, Coronation Street, which has broken from its roots in Northern working-class humour and transformed itself into a completely different programme more akin to a Salford-set equivalent of The Wire.

Another look at the Moss Nook and Heald Green pub scene

The first local CAMRA event cancelled at the start of lockdown in March 2020 was a pub crawl around Moss Nook and Heald Green; on Friday night, more than two years behind schedule, it finally happened.

The record breaking temperatures at the start of the week had thankfully been replaced by the overcast skies and light drizzle more normal for Manchester, making for a pleasant mile and a half stroll around this mostly residential suburban area at the edge of the airport and Cheshire countryside, extending along the southern border of the city and into the neighbouring borough of Stockport.

With the original starting point, Robinson’s Tatton Arms, closed for refurbishment, four of us assembled at the nearby Flying Horse, a chain dining pub which opened at the end of 2013. A pump-clip for Greene King IPA greeted us on the bar, but it turned out not to be available, and with our next call at the Heald Green Hotel (an inter-war Whitbread pub, and keg-only haunt of mine when I was a teenager in the late eighties) equally brief – a plastic pint pot atop the single hand-pump for Doom Bar signalled its unavailability, gruffly confirmed by the barman – after fifteen minutes we’d been to two pubs without drinking a drop of beer – as someone said, the evening was becoming less of a pub crawl and more like a Temperance tour!

Luckily, Brew HG, a café/bar in a former florist’s shop on the other side of the railway station, gave us a friendly welcome, seats at a table outside and a craft beer menu that included a few Belgian bottle-conditioned strong ales – it could almost have been Brussels if it hadn’t been for the aircraft about to land at the airport descending overhead; they also had German lagers and wheat beers in bottles and Beavertown Neck Oil IPA on draught at the bar. One to return to I think.

Having phoned ahead to confirm its availability, we were assured of cask beer in the form of freshly pulled through Doom Bar at the Cheadle Royal, a modern, low-rise building on a business park at the opposite end of the village, with which it shares its name as well as with the adjacent Victorian psychiatric hospital.

Our final call was at the Griffin, my local in the nineties and early noughties, when it was a typically squat, and smoky, sixties-built estate pub, since transformed by Holt’s into an airy food-led place once described as looking like Southfork Ranch, where we found their bitter in good condition, an upbeat end to an evening which had begun with an inauspicious series of swift retreats before improving in both hospitability and beer quality.

The Sherwood Foresters

I've just finished watching Sherwood, the BBC drama set in a former Nottinghamshire pit village still split by the 1984-85 miners' strike, at the edge of the eponymous forest into which a young bow and arrow-wielding murderer flees (Robin Hood isn't the only literary reference - the Metropolitan Police spies sent into the coalfield at the start of the strike with the identities of dead children assume codenames of Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, who lived nearby at Newstead Abbey, where the investigators meet the National Union of Mineworkers' lawyer to discuss their undercover operations).

The plot combines a crime drama based on two real, but unconnected, killings in the same area, revealing the identity of the murderers from the start and focussing more on their motivations, with a slower uncovering of secrets in the backgrounds and personal lives of the police and petty criminal characters.

The series sketches some of the background to the bitterness, with flashbacks to the 1984-85 strike when Nottinghamshire's pits and a big majority of its thirty thousand miners worked throughout the year long dispute as flying pickets from Yorkshire to the north clashed with police dispatched to confront them from the south. Although the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM had always been on the right of the union, and split from it at the end of the strike (as it had after the 1926 General Strike), their ostensible reason for not joining the strike (the failure to call a national ballot) was always a pretty threadbare excuse, with thick seams of coal, modern mines and good wages meaning that they felt safe from the closure programme which would decimate the industry elsewhere in the country by the late 80s (they weren't: in 1992, the Tory government, which had lauded them as heroes in 1984-85 and promised them jobs for life, turned on them and shut their pits down too).

There are a couple of nice beer references: the NUM stalwart and murder victim who orders a pint of mix (mild and bitter) and the leader of the striking Yorkshire miners who bemoans the lack of Tetley's in the local club when they come down on a coach for his memorial.

Guinness is good for youth?

Channel Four's Inside the Superbrands last night looked at the world's most popular stout, and major Irish export, Guinness.

When I started drinking in pubs as a teenager in the late 80s, I occasionally drank bottle-conditioned Extra Stout as well as the cask bitter in my local Holt's house, or Draught Guinness in keg-only places, but since the former became a filtered and pasteurised, and to my palate rather thin, product and the latter is now usually sold in the Extra Cold form that tastes of nothing, the only version I really still like is bottled Foreign Extra Stout, which is much closer in both strength and mouthfeel to the original Extra Stout.

There was a bit about the alleged continuity of their brewing methods which I found a little hard to believe when they were standing next to a row of shiny new, sealed stainless steel vessels, but I didn't spot any of the many myths about Guinness which often pop up in things like this. There was also an interesting section about how the famous Guinness adverts began in the late 20s (although I thought they might have mentioned the Anglo-Irish Trade War just after that, which led to Guinness building a brewery at Park Royal in west London, too).

The programme spent a lot of time discussing Guinness's lack of appeal to young people in Britain and Ireland and the likely impact of this on future consumption of the beer, although as long as it still sells well in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean I can't see the company being too threatened by that, and despite the marketing spiel rolled out by PR agencies and pluggers I'm still unconvinced that the key to attracting them is the non-alcoholic Guinness Zero which they launched a couple of years ago.

Stockport(er) in the sunshine

After a three year break because of Covid, Stockport Beer and Cider Festival kicked off at Edgeley Park football ground with a trade session yesterday afternoon.

A couple of things had changed since my last visit to the home of the Hatters back in the summer of 2019: Stockport County are now a Football League club again, and the Cheadle End where the festival is held has been redeveloped, although the concourse under the stand where the bars are wasn't as different as I'd expected.

I drank mostly darker, stronger beers - Kirkstall X Mild, based on a recipe from 1885, Redwillow Heritage Porter and Stockport Stock Porter - as well as Kerala IPA from the former Howard Town, now Distant Hills Brewery, in Glossop. I also popped to the bottled beer bar in one of the function rooms at the top of the stand, whose temporary licence now allows off sales, and picked up a couple of my favourite smoked German lager Schlenkerla.

On the way back to the station we popped into the Olde Vic, somewhere else I hadn't been to for a few years, and had a pint in the beer garden there. One of Stockport's first freehouses and a longtime Good Beer Guide pub, it seemed to be doing a decent post-festival trade.