One of the best museums in the whole country and recently proclaimed THE best tourist site in Wiltshire (beating out the likes of Stonehenge, Avebury, and the Salisbury Cathedral), STEAM is on my doorstep…literally less than 10 minutes stroll from my front door and yet I haven’t been there this entire year…a matter corrected Saturday. [...]

I have frequently run the hills around the Folly (built by the eccentric Lord Berners, dubbed during its construction as “Lord Berners’ monstrous erection” by a local newsman).  It has been two years since the first time I tried to go to the Folly pub and it was worthy of the repeated effort (another example of failed Folly-ing [...]

On a one day consultancy callout to my old job at Cambridge I took two days to arrived early, relaxed, and to get a nice run and a few new pubs under my belt beforehand.  I had some issues with a new computer for the wife which put my escape from Swindon back a couple [...]

A guy in a high visibility jacket came to the crowd I was in and asked, “is anyone here waiting for Route 66?” Shit, I rushed over to catch the one at quarter past it was now 5 minutes late with this guy continuing, “it has broken down and the next one will be in [...]

The race over, all that remained was the long bus ride home.  I was lucky enough to catch the 11:45 but as we topped the hill into Hilmartin I thought I deserved a celebratory pint and hopped off at the Duke, a mid-19th century inn of remarkably thick-walled construction. The staff are quite friendly to [...]

To get to the Chippenham Half Marathon on time, I had to catch a bus from Cardiff to Bristol and a train after that.  This left me a layover of an hour and fifteen minutes which I used wisely by going to the Commercial Rooms for a bit of fluid replacement and carbohydrates via a [...]

I didn’t really need another beer and this was more of a café than a pub, but I couldn’t possibly resist a bar named Steamers (see this Urban Dictionary entry if you aren’t already smirking).  I got a Grolsch which was green.  Not the container but the beer itself: for the uninitiated, when you store [...]

  I met the wife after her conference and we grabbed a bite then an early train back to London, and as we were not only on advanced sales tickets for a late train from Paddington Station to Swindon (reserved seating means you can only use the train for which you are scheduled) but that [...]

I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.  Okay, so I got two cups of coffee, took a train to London, ordered a full English breakfast and had a beer with it.  Then I had a beer between runs, and rum after running to 28 out of 30 historic churches.  Then a [...]

After the hash, I still had an historic pub on my list but I needed to change to the Overground at West Brompton tube stop.  Once there, it turned out there was a replacement bus service (of course) and I dearly hate the replacement bus service.  Had it not been raining (and a bank holiday) [...]