Dolphin Inn, Glascote

 Take me down to the Paradise City sang Axl in the epic Guns n Roses song and I’m wondering if he got his inspiration from a trip to the Dolphin Inn…

….next door is Pizza Paradise and next to that is Food Paradise. A true utopia just outside of Tamworth’s town centre. 

Now as Tamworth is one of the most landlocked towns in the country I have genuinely no idea where the name of the pub comes from. I’d be very surprised if one of these sea creatures has been spotted swimming up and down the adjacent Coventry canal. Then again this may be a good idea to bring in the tourists, Loch Ness residents have been dining out on alleged sightings of a mythical sea character for decades. I can just see hordes of Japanese and American tourists flocking to a gift shop in The Dophin to buy a dolphin on a rope, dolphin fridge magnets, dolphin tea towel,  the possibilities are endless !!

Now, where was I?!! Ah yes, the pub. It has just reopened after the previous tenants left with the pub closed for just over six months. However great things are now expected for this place as owners Star Pubs and Bars have proudly stated ‘ We will soon be developing exciting plans for an investment programme in The Dolphin, we will announce full details in due course’. Now I don’t mean to be sceptical but I heard a similar statement from Carson Yeung when he took over at Birmingham City, fast forward a few years we’d been relegated and he was in jail on money laundering charges !!

Although this pub is probably about a mile and a half from our desirable residence it’s not a pub we use very often. During one of our rare visits on a Saturday afternoon a while back a bloke and his lady were sat at the bar having a quiet drink, a while later we heard the sound of sirens outside and we were informed that the couple were being hauled into the back of a police car for brawling with one another outside the pub. Rumours that it was due to her claiming she’d seen a dolphin at nearby Alvecote marina are apparently wide of the mark !!

I thought I’d pay the place a visit to see if anything had changed since the pub had reopened. The only customers in (early on a sunny Tuesday evening) were a bloke and his dog. As soon as I walked in he licked my leg…the dog that is not the bloke, that would just be weird !!

The good news was there is a Happy Hour early evening from Monday to Thursday with a very generous reduction of a £1 off most pints, the bad news was I’d missed it by 25 minutes, so with no sign of any cask beer I handed over £4.50 for a pint of Birra Moretti. 

The bloke with the dog (who I christened Gene Simmons due to his long licky tongue) was giving the barmaid some good natured stick due to the fact that she’d turned up 10 minutes late for work. I nearly choked on my overpriced Italian beer when she blamed her tardiness on the HS2, it isn’t planned to start running for at least another ten years !! As excuses go it is as implausible as not having your homework cos you lost your exercise book behind the radiator. It transpired however it was traffic congestion caused by HS2 construction work that disrupted her bus journey from Marston Green to The Dolphin.

A regular made a flying visit without buying a pint, when the barmaid questioned him as to why he wasn’t stopping to wet his whistle his excuse was almost as bad as hers earlier…‘I’ve only come in to use the loo, I can’t stop cos my tea’s ready’ !!

It was a good job there was plenty going on in the pub to keep me entertained as the quality of the sport being shown on the tv left a lot to be desired, Sky Sports Main Event was showing pool !!

I decided to catch up with the day’s events on my phone, Dear Deidre is still sorting out the nation’s problems in The Sun with that day’s being a particularly tricky one ‘I caught my wife kissing our female neighbour on her kitchen counter’. I’m still not sure if that was a euphemism!! 

There was talk of a Blues takeover in the online edition of the Birmingham Mail with one dodgy owner seemingly selling his stake to another dodgy owner. The poster displayed in the pub seemed quite appropriate..

The pub is divided into three rooms, I assume I was in the lounge, there is a smaller room maybe the sort of place where Ena Sharples would’ve hung out in Coronation St..

….and a back room that was holding a very competitive game of pool between two old boys who were that serious they’d brought their own cues. Maybe this was what was being shown on Sky Sports Main Event !! Every so often I heard When Harry Met Sally style screams of ecstasy coming from the pool room. The one bloke (Sally !!) was full of apologies when he came into the lounge between frames to get his round in, ‘It’s all right, I get excited when I win’ !! Funnily enough for some reason there’s never a requirement for me to be that vociferous at St Andrews !!

Unexpectedly I heard the dubious sound of All That She Wants coming from the pub’s tv, the barmaid replaced the pool with Magic tv, not that I’d describe Ace of Base as magic. In fact when I saw the channel name I was hoping for a Paul Daniels show !!

Believe it or not the music took a turn for the worse with Shania Twain’s woeful You’re Still the One. My mind went back to a moment in my local The Gate recently with my better half. A local singer was performing and I felt sorry for her as firstly there weren’t many punters in and secondly those that were in didn’t bother clapping at the end of numbers so there was tumbleweed blowing all round the pub. When therefore she announced she was going to do a singalong number I cringed. So, you guessed it when we got to the chorus of Shania’s biggest hit and she said ‘Your turn’ to the pub I was the only one singing ‘Man, I feel like a woman’ much to the embarrassment of my good lady !! 

Boyz to Mens dire End of the Road was my drinking up moment at The Dolphin. An amusing visit to a proper pub, long may these type of places continue.