Monday 22nd November 2025, 3pm "Don't even start on the lifts cos I'm sick of hearing about them. YES, I KNOW one is out of service and the other is being repaired. You'll just have to take the stairs. If ONE MORE person mentions it to me today, I'm going to lose it, so how can I help you?" "Errrm, well I just want to check in if possible?" I squeak in reply. This was the start to a week of pub ticking, 33 Greater London Good Beer Guide pubs remain, the majority of which

Saturday 22nd November 2025 All aboard the Dudley bound bus, 10:15am on a grey drizzly Brum day. A return home for my eponymous duck mascot. A slightly less talkative fellow traveller than Daddy BRAPA. No trains to London today had forced our hand, no QPR away game for us. We'd lose anyway, so it proved a lucky break. Not to mention the fact I'd be in London on Monday for the beginning of a week's ticking. Plenty of churn for me in the West Midlands in 2026, randomly dot

Thursday 20th November 2025 Winter is here! I skid down to York station in near blizzard conditions, thankfully only a brisk seven minute walk from BRAPA Towers. I'm already against the clock for my train. My leaky boiler, which was repaired yesterday, is working, but now no heat is getting into the radiators. Why do these things always happen in the worst possible conditions? At the station under the scoreboard, I get chatting to this chirpy lady. "I'm loving watching t

Saturday 15th November 2025 Flask of coffee, crumbly Mummy BRAPA homemade cherry scone, and a blank football weekend. It simply had to be. A Daddy BRAPA Lincolnshire car day. One of my most eagerly anticipated of all outings in the pub ticking calendar. Lincs churn had for the first time ever, been fairly kind in 2025/26 and I can only assume they've run out of random village pubs making their GBG debut despite having been open for centuries doing their own thing. It was

Happy New Year pub lovers! 2025 has been a record breaking year here at BRAPA towers. 664 Good Beer Guide ticks, bettering the 619 I managed in 2024. I'd never have believed I'd come close to that twelve months ago. The mascots are drunk, are you? You should be! Colin (retired), Ivor Panda, Pedro Plum, Oscar (suspended), Dudley T. Duck, Owlie McBurnie. So pour yourself a strong drink (ESB, red wine, whisky, I don't mind), or if this is hangover reading, an icy glass of

Thursday 13th November Under the majestic tripe inspired roof at London King's Cross, so often the base for all manner of BRAPA days, I bring you this six pub morale booster. I was down in Croydon on holiday (said no one ever!) in little over a week, but having travelled down on the mid-morning Grand Central service instead of the 08:27 (which I'm blaming on their rubbish website), I didn't want to be too expansive with my ticking. Especially after last weekend's Stirling tr

Saturday 8th November 2025 Judy woz robbed At the sign of Sir Andrew Murray's golden post box, I arrive in Dunblane on a grey damp Autumnal morn, keen to build on my pathetic total of ONE pub (Falkirk's excellent Wheatsheaf) in the area known in the Good Beer Guide as 'Loch Lomond, Stirling & Trossachs'. There's not much of Scotland that is comfortably doable in the day from good ole' York, but the Stirling area is a fertile hunting ground and I will be back in January to mop

Thursday 6th November 2025 This is big Les Wade. He's got nothing to do with Biggleswade, but his cardigan is giving 'disappointing 'Spoons carpet' and his book could be a 1940's CAMRA Good Beer Guide. I'm sick of opening my GBG on the first pub page and seeing Biggleswade's Wetherspoons unticked. Not a difficult tick to get done by any means, but when you've got a quirky ole' dude from Hitchin called John saying "Si, make sure you don't do it without me!" it requires more

Saturday 1st November 2025 Uncanny isn't it? And that's not a pun based on the spooky Danny Robbins show of the same name. But it can be, if you know what I'm on about. With no appetite for our yearly lunchtime kick off at Carrow Road on the part of either Daddy BRAPA or myself (just one new Norwich tick required this year), a 'gentle' car day of Very North Yorkshire was decided upon. After all, six ticks are better than one. Naughty Little Cousin Pumpy made his annual ma

Friday 24th October 2025 The final day of my week in Glasgow, and a final go on my (almost) homemade concoction of haggis, scrambled eggs and blueberries for breakfast, none of which I'd foraged myself. I was ever so slightly hungover as predicted in Scotia Bar the previous night (my last three pints had been 6%, 5.9% and 5.6%), so an extra special can of Irn-Bru was supped in Central Station to take the edge off whilst I wait for the train out Inverclyde way. Only two ticks

I want to start this blog with the sad news I learned yesterday evening that Peter 'Pub Curmudgeon' Edwardson has died. I'm so pleased that I met this talismanic #PubMan on three occasions. The first being on 31st March 2018 in one of those 'Sizzling' pubs at Culcheth (Cherry Tree). He'd kindly DM'd me whilst I was in Daresbury's Ring O' Bells offering to drive me to other required ticks at Golborne (Queen Anne) and Lowton (Travellers Rest). Mudgie wields the green Stabilo

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 A pleasant breakfast at last, at the third time of asking. Prepared by my own fair hand. Nicely done scrambled eggs with REAL butter (Anchor, so not Scottish because they are based in dire Westbury, the greyest of all Wiltshire towns including Swindon, please don't argue). Haggis from a tin cos it's nice and easy and I had a 'raised' microwave. Greasy and spicy. Great mouthfeel like an double imperial stout. Two types of juice in a vague attemp

Greetings from December! 72 (SEVENTY TWO) new Good Beer Guide pubs ticked in the month of November, my third best ever monthly total, bringing me up to 631 for the year, already a BRAPA record even if I do diddly squat in December. My total is now 3,181, which represents 70.69% Guide completion. Clawing back that deficit one pub at a time! Back in credit by May? Let's have a look at the counties where I've made gains, with the pubs I enjoyed most (and least) ..... we'll hav

Tuesday 21st October 2025 It was an early Hallowe'en scare-a-thon on day three of my attempt to tick every Good Beer Guide in the Greater Glasgow & Clyde Valley region. Every BRAPA holiday, it happens. There's always ONE day where I feel that the pub gods aren't particularly smiling on me, that luck isn't in my favour, like 'why did I remove that lucky rabbit foot off the BRAPA keyring?', 'why did I walk under that ladder in Gorbals?', 'why did I adjust the horseshoe on tha

Monday 20th October 2025 I forgot to order one of those yummy looking Adagio Aparthotel breakfasts, so after my own healthy Scottish brekkie of porridge and blueberries, I went down to reception to book myself in for tomorrow which I'll tell you about in part three. But this is a pub blog we mustn't forget, and the next alphabetical Glasgow & Clyde Valley pub I need takes me to Biggar, so southern, it's practically Borders. I had to take a train to Lanark, and change for a b

Sunday 19th October 2025 'Spoons vouchers at the ready as I embark on a six day tick-a-thon of Greater Glasgow and the Clyde Valley, with a view to Ayrshire if things went really well. Various levels of excitement, anticipation and anxiety always precede a BRAPA holiday, but for this I was '100% buzzing' as unlike say Norfolk or Cornwall, transport links and pub opening times are plentiful and kind. With local lad Owlie McBurnie ready for his homecoming of sorts (hailing from

Saturday 11th October 2025 Victoria Hotel, Norham (3066 / 5907) Outdoor drinking on the Scottish/Northumbria border in October? Who says the polar ice caps melting is all bad? A friendly pub but with limited space, plus Dad's sudden craving for a smuggled Melton Mowbray pork pie and a fine village green and such warmth, outdoors was a no-brainer and made a mockery of Bath's Coeur de Lion barman who claimed 5th September was the last warm day of 2025. And an excellent Jarl

Thursday 9th October 2025 Before we head to deepest Borders, we'll start with a reassuringly thirsty #ThirstyThursday yielding six ticks across three different parts of the north west. Such is the plethora of pub options available to me in the first month of the new Good Beer Guide year. Pack Horse, Affetside (3057 / 5898) My one Greater Manchester miss of 2025 that's retained its place in the GBG. Truth is I couldn't be arsed to travel up to rural Bolton-Bury just for one

Saturday 4th October 2025 The Bass omens were good at Marylebone as I headed NW to Prinny Riz (Princes Risborough to you uninitiated oiks) for a pub heavy day along the Oxfordshire / Buckinghamshire border. BRAPA debutant and chauffeur is Sladey / Dave / David / Komakino, who lives locally at Chinnor and kindly offered me this opportunity several months in advance ..... I was simply waiting for the 2026 Good Beer Guide to 'drop' (ugh) to ensure the churn wasn't too concerning

Saturday 27th September 2025 A wise man called RetiredMartin agrees that there's nothing more joyous in life than an early Autumn mop-up of Central London's new Good Beer Guide entries, of which there's always thousands, even if you're an experienced completist like him. And I had the perfect excuse, Watford away with Daddy BRAPA just two days after the official GBG release date. A quick note on why I think C.London's churn is so brutal. Two reasons. Firstly, it doesn't