GeoGuessr – Royal Fusilier (Aingers Green)

This is part of the GEOGUESSR 1 series of posts.

I’ve had to really ponder what to write about this pub. Nathan, being well, Nathan, carefully writes down every pub he visits and I know that’s he just visited over 100 this year. I don’t keep such assiduous records, but I think I’m at something like 125 (irritatingly, not that many more than him). I mention this just to quantify the number of visits we make and so that our expectations of pubs generally aren’t unnecessarily skewed.

Anyway, I don’t really ever get bad service anywhere, as I’ve carefully selected pubs that I think I’ll like, that are in the Good Beer Guide or manage to be on-trend and exciting. There’s a bit of a theme on this blog where I keep writing that everywhere is friendly, but that’s not really surprising given how I’m trying to pick decent places to go.

Normally, if I had a bad experience in a pub, I probably just wouldn’t post about it (although I’m struggling to remember a bad experience this year). It’s important to remember that a publican has a difficult job (I should know…..), they may be having an off-day, they may come across in a way that they didn’t mean or they might have an issue that they’re dealing with in the best way that they know. So, I’d likely just not post anything about an experience which wasn’t friendly.

But, I’m trying to write here about the day we had whilst on our pointless and irrelevant GeoGuessr adventure, so I can’t really miss much out of the narrative. And, before I write the next paragraph, I’ll say that it’s great this pub is open and it’s clear that someone has spent lots of time and energy trying to make it work. It’s well reviewed, especially for food, and I took some photos of the interior which show-cased some of their work. I tried my very best to like this pub given all of that.

But, there seems little point in writing too much about that, as it was clear from the off-set that we weren’t welcome. On the grounds that we were just trying to get a quiet drink (of real ale, not Stella mixed with Aftershock) I can’t say I entirely understand what the issue was from the staff, but I’ll assume there were factors involved that I didn’t understand.

Anyway, we had one more pub left before we left Great Bentley for the bright lights of Colchester (and as a spoiler to cheer things up, we had an exceptionally good experience at a Colchester pub) so we marched off into the dark ready for a short stroll.