Beer Compurgation

If we learn one thing from our time in various states of social restriction, that many incorrectly keep referring to as lockdown, it is that we will learn absolutely nothing. Now is a time when we could as a population begin to sit back, relax and listen to each individual birdsong by an open window, trying to distinguish between the call of a goldfinch and a chaffinch.  Instead we will spend the 23 hours a day we are painfully awake flitting between social media and 24hr news channels, absorbing each and every speculative scrap of claptrap, to give us something else to talk about between checking Facebook again and opening more gin.  For me, it is the “updates” on pub reopenings and the conclusion of the football season. The latter involves me glancing at fictitious articles written by increasingly desperate sports reporters, fed to me through a WhatsApp group comprised mostly of Manchester United fans; Manchester United fans who are happy with their own club's

Recently, and partly due to the demise of Bury FC , I’ve decided to spend the odd spare Saturday I have throughout the football season going to watch a local (for now) football team and take in some of the pubs and bars around the towns and stadiums in which they reside. The key to showing your age is to bewail how fast the time goes, so allow me to indulge in this nonsense. I’m writing this post on the 30 th March 2020, exactly three years to the day that I previewed this initial guide/travel companion to my first round trip of Glossop . Pubs included in that post had been visited in 2016. The idea that it was so many years ago was a surprise to me, even though I am fairly certain time is still functioning in its regular form. I spend a lot of time in and around Glossop nowadays, mostly because – spoiler alert – I live in close proximity to it. Sometimes I even wrongly refer to the area as a whole as Glossopdale and suggest I live there, more to annoy the prou