Real Ale, Real Music

Another tale from the wastes of lockdown, featuring an afternoon's wander along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal in the Colne Valley, and assorted ramblings about beer, pubs, and this and that.... The weather had been brighter and warmer of late, the days beginning to stretch out ever so much, and with me having had my first jab and talk of roadmaps and pandemic restrictions gradually easing, I felt bold enough to venture a little further afield for my weekly walk. It was only 8 miles or so from home, but the Colne Valley felt like a new world. I walked the towpath of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal from Slaithwaite, as I had done last spring as far as Marsden, but this time I carried on further to Tunnel End. Here the towpath stops as the canal and the adjacent railway line disappear abruptly into the Pennine hillside. The walk was by default muddy, but also quite wet underfoot in parts with the canal even spilling on to the path here and there, and so, along with an assortment of fell...

Lockdown has been bad for all of those of us that like to visit pubs. But spare a thought for the regulars of The Jolly Angler, a pub tucked away amongst the towering developments and industrial units behind Manchester's Piccadilly Station. When the pubs do finally get to open up again, the Jolly Angler will sadly not be amongst them, the pub having become yet another victim of the city's rapacious development. And so there goes another traditional pub and a part of the city's glorious pub history. Here are my thoughts, plus a few other bits and pieces.... I first visited the Jolly Angler when I lived in Manchester in the 1970's. A basic Hyde's tied house situated on a street-corner between Piccadilly Station and Great Ancoats Street, it had a real Irish atmosphere to it. Steered by a long-disappeared guide to all of the pubs in and around the city centre, we had stumbled upon it one evening, a group of long-haired students well away from the regular haunts around O...