HHHII The Longest Pub Crawl

In 2004 the bon viveur, pub anorak and affable twit Ian Marchant embarked on a pub crawl from the Turk's Head in the Scilly Isles to the Baltasound Hotel on Unst, the most northerly of the Shetlands.

The journey is suitably free-flowing, teetering between a spot of Somerset cider tasting and trying to cure a hangover at St Anne's Well in the Malvern Hills, then on to Shropshire for "two piss-ups in two breweries". Marchant is irrepressible, leaking titbits about the foul history of temperance, whinging about vegetarians and cramming in as much local history as you'd expect from a pub quiz devotee.

Of course, in the same way that some individuals are born with a constitution that lets them down ten pints of ale and then run a dozen miles the next morning, there will be readers who'll be able to cope with all this pub fever without wishing Marchant had drowned in a barrel of gassy lager somewhere near High Holborn. For most, however, it's probably a book best-consumed in short measures.

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