CAST ALONE UPON A DESERT ISLAND, I shall be allowed just one book, so I shall choose the Biography of James Hudson Taylor. He was a man with a mission. In 1850, he had made up his mind that it was his desire to spread the Christian message to China, and was moved to write:
“Think of it – 360 million souls, without God or hope in the world! Think of more than twelve million of our fellow creatures dying every year without any of the consolations of the Gospel. Barnsley including the Common has only 15,000 inhabitants. Imagine what it would be if all these were to die in twelve months! Yet in China every year hundreds are dying, for every man, woman and child in Barnsley. Poor, neglected China! Scarcely anyone cares about it.”
So strong was James Hudson Taylor’s concern about his observed imbalance in the world between Barnsley, including the Common, and China, that he prayed many times a day that the Lord would give him the power to do something to redress it. And the Lord did come up trumps, in a way. By the end of his life Hudson Taylor led an organisation of over six hundred missionaries working in China with-headquarters in London and Shanghai comprising what would now be considered highly valuable real estate. He never asked for donations to his cause, yet the entire organisation was supported by donations. He prayed, he lectured, he gave speeches and presentations, and the money was given.
Not that his was an easy passage, in fact it was a constant battle with hardship for both him and his missionaries. His early years in China were so arduous that they effectively killed his wife. He prayed hard to the Lord, though, and received the advice that it would be the right thing to do to marry one of his assistants pretty quick.
The trials of James and of the missionaries in China ranged from being beaten with sticks by chauvinistic Chinese in remote inland regions to more psychologically taxing dilemmas. For example, the first time Hudson Taylor visited the USA on a lecture tour, money came pouring in faster than he could spend it. This gave him cause for great deliberations. It is all very well asking the Lord to provide and having one’s wishes granted, but what are you to make of it when the Lord provides before you have even asked? Do you just say, “Trust those bloody Americans to wreck the system?” Not James Hudson Taylor. He prayed to the Lord for guidance and received the reply that he should use this money to broaden the international make-up of his missionary force which up to that time had been almost exclusively British and Chinese. The problem then arose, that the American volunteers kept getting subsidised by their local church and families, so the donations would still not diminish. It is enough to give you a headache, and James Hudson Taylor appears to have had more than his share of pains in the head and various other parts of his body.
To us now, it may seem a strange Lord to believe in, who selects Barnsley, including the Common, for special privilege and leaves the great majority of the world’s population out of the equation, but the Victorian evangelisers had no such doubts. They had faith. They had a mission. And it produced results. That the substance of the mission was not one resilient to logical argument, and actually not a sustainable one over the long term, are not the point, a mission believed in strongly enough can succeed, however essentially bonkers.
By the time of Mao’s assumption of power in China in 1949, there were so many missionaries of the China Inland Mission, located in so many areas of China, that it took the Communist authorities until 1953 to get them all out. Many of them had no home to go back to and ended up living in the headquarters of the China Inland Mission at Newington Green in North London. They each had a little room, a cell almost, and ate communally at a long, heavily-scrubbed, wooden table in the area onto which their rooms opened. They drank tea that was very milky, and when I was a teenage Saturday-helper to Harry the Express Dairy milkman, we would be expected to sit for a while after having delivered the crate of milk, and to take a cup of tea with the ex-missionaries, quite a number of whom seemed to be suffering from elephantiasis of the legs, and this tea was extremely milky. Whether they were, as good caring Christians, simply trying to be appropriate as they saw it to the milkman, with all this milk, or whether they always drank it like that I cannot say, but I didn’t like it much.
The China Inland Mission had blossomed, boomed, and then begun to fade within a period of about 100 years. Not many poor unfortunates to evangelise to, in Newington Green, not many who would listen, anyway.
James Hudson Taylor’s organisation was in the right place at the right time. The language of the time spoke of, ‘devoting yourself to God’. Hudson Taylor’s biographers described how his parents made love:
“Long and earnest was the talk that followed in view of the happiness to which they were looking forward. Then together they knelt to fulfil as literally as possible an obligation they could not relegate to Hebrew parents of old. Just as definitely the Lord responded, giving them faith to realise that He had accepted their gift: that henceforth the life so dear to them must be held at the disposal of a higher claim, a deeper love, than theirs.”
Had James Hudson Taylor been a young man in 1950, instead of 1850, the language of his biographer would have been blunter, less elitist, more understandable by those used to scanning the lines rather than reading between them, and with a greater sense of personal responsibility – his parents would have been more likely to make love because they felt it was a good thing to do, rather than devising some justification for it not being their fault really, since the Hebrew rulers were no longer of much practical benefit. And did they really do it kneeling?
It is also most unlikely in the latter half of the 20th century that James’ crazy life-plan would have worked. He would have had to follow a different crazy life-plan instead. Perhaps, he would have felt moved, with or without all his fervent prayer, to start a business.
If you ask modern-day business people what the mission of their company is, they sometimes give a reply along the lines of, “to maximise our profits and provide a good return for our shareholders”. You even hear this from marketing people, who should know better, because that is not a mission at all. It is like saying that your mission as a human being is to be alive, be successful, then die. In a sense it is, that cannot be denied, but it is not a particularly useful philosophical stance. You cannot do much with it as an idea. You have no way of knowing what steps to take to make it happen, different from what you are doing now.
Had James Hudson Taylor followed the return-for-the-shareholders type of mission, he would have probably remained a jobbing chemist in Barnsley. There will be some who would say that it would have not been too serious if he had, but he was a man with a mission, a real mission, so dispensing pills in Barnsley became out of the question.
James Hudson’s Taylor’s organisation is still an international force of sorts at the beginning of the 21st century. Now called OMF, a current-fashion acronym for the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, it operates in a number of countries and its goal is very clearly defined. It wants to spread Christianity in Asia. It has been good at moving with the times and now has an approach that is quite different from James’ 19th century one; rather than sending missionaries to preach, it sends ambassadors to encourage. All very commensurate with the moment, and hence it survives.
What can be done with a mission! A true mission, that is, one that you can get your teeth into. It matters little, as James Hudson Taylor’s life clearly demonstrated, that there are gainsayers of a logical frame a mind; a mission firmly-enough believed in, can do wonders.
Our original mission was to provide an affordable venue for groups of working people to meet for discussion or training courses, where the ambience and food were conducive to productive work. We also wanted to provide a venue from which people would leave feeling good about themselves, as opposed to the complaining or laughable state that we have perceived so many people remember, or more often forget, a training course or conference by.
We were going to be reasonably priced, comfortable, informal, appreciative of our guests’ working needs. A fun place to be with food relevant to a modern day working life. There would be no constant workman next door drilling a hole in the wall while people were trying to think, no sound of the tea trolley clinkity-bumping down the corridor as they try to concentrate. We bought a small country hotel in a sparsely populated area and this led us to modify our mission somewhat. Year on year, small hotels and guest houses in locations such as ours seemed to be shrinking and getting broker. The were clearly doing something wrong. We were inexperienced amateurs and, like James Hudson Taylor and others before us, we had latched onto, and were putting into effect, a crazy and illogical scheme. Or rather a scheme that many would see as crazy and illogical and may well have been crazy and illogical. But like James Hudson Taylor in our obviously much less dramatic and far-reaching way, we believed in it, most of the time anyway.
Being children of the 20th rather than the 19th century we had no higher spiritual force that we could lay the blame on, we took full personal responsibility for this mad idea ourselves, though the effect was the same. We had a mission; we knew how we wanted it to be.
There is something implicit in missions, that is not always made clear by those who propose them. It is that if you have a mission, you are looking towards tomorrow. Tomorrow, you want things to be different from the way they are today. Everyone knows that is what a mission implies, it is obvious, (except those people in organisations who can talk of nothing but maximising returns to their shareholders). James Hudson Taylor wanted tomorrow to bring the people of China into parity with the people of Barnsley. We wanted tomorrow to bring the quality of residential serviced accommodation into parity with what we considered to be exemplary. We were as mad as JHT, and no less egocentric.
Because we are expecting to realise our dream tomorrow, we are aware that there is not much chance of success by aiming to provide that which people want today. By the time the people get here, it will be the past, and we knew from the start that there is no hope of carving a future out of the past. We must instead predict that which our customers are going to want tomorrow, before they themselves know they are going to want it.
Switching from Christianity to Zen Buddhism for the moment, there is an argument which says that tomorrow never comes. In order to reach Nirvana you must already be in Nirvana, because you can never be there while at the same time you are trying to attain it, the two concepts of journey and destination are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, if for you the arrival is a disappointment and your Nirvana lies in the travelling, then providing tomorrow really does never come, you will not have a problem, you can be in Nirvana while trying to attain it, and this is probably the convenient position that all true missionaries find themselves in, so we can go back into alignment with the Hudson Taylor mindset again.
Our mission started off as a desire to be an exemplary meetings and training centre, then it moved onto a somewhat higher plane. After a small amount of experience it developed into a wish to get people who originate from north of Peterborough to enjoy the benefits of life that people who originate from the warmer corners of Britain, such as ourselves, have been privileged enough to enjoy for some years. We would introduce them to fruit and vegetables. We also wanted to succeed – to make a business work against all the odds, and certainly against the aims of the moneylenders who seemed determined that we should fail.
We did it! We achieved both of these things. Not 100 per cent, of course, because that would be failure in terms of Nirvana being the journey rather than the destination. We developed a growing business – the journey, and we contributed just a little bit, every day, to the changing diet and experiences of the great people of Britain outside of the affluent south easterly corner, another aspect of the journey.
As if to celebrate our first indications of success, when we began to see that we had a product that was in demand, one whose problems looked like they might be those of success, our friend Mrs Grey Duck produced some chicks, which survived! As usual, when Mrs Grey Duck’s chicks hatched, the weather turned ugly. Wind, rain, low temperatures, and Mrs Grey Duck suddenly appeared with five little chicks. No hope of them surviving, we thought, in this weather. A week later, there were still five, and still the weather was damp and cold. Two weeks later, three were still alive. Usually, we had found that if a chick survives for more than two weeks it survives to adulthood. Its only real dangers in the interim are crows and foxes, of which by far the most serious is crows. One morning we heard a commotion – some crows had cornered one of the chicks. When this happens, the only real defence the duck has is to quack loudly, in the hope of diverting the crow. Many of Mrs Grey Duck’s compatriots joined in, hence the commotion, but it was no good, the chick was pecked to death and carried away.
The remaining two chicks survived, seeing practically nothing in the way of sunshine until they were indistinguishable from their elders. So much for theory about what conditions it takes to help a chick live, except perhaps the ever-holding truism, that life is a lottery. Mrs Grey Duck was now happy, and would come quacking round the kitchen door once or twice a day, looking pleased with herself. It had taken five years and about 150 chicks, to get two to become fully fledged duckies. Then with the chicks just getting their flight feathers, her partner, for ducks seem to pair up with others who look similar to themselves, Mr Grey Duck, walked into the road and got run over by a car, his innards splatted across the tarmac. Ah, well, Mrs Grey Duck, life is a lottery for a duck, you win some you lose some, but then she did not need to be told that, it was she who was teaching us that.
LOOKING BACK, WE PONDER what it was that had caused our business to grow, at a time when so many people in more-or-less the same occupation had found themselves getting worse off year by year. We do this analytical searching all the time. What was the sound move? What was a mistake to be learned from?
The best thing we did, the issue that always comes out on top, the thing about which there is never any question and which we are constantly pleased that we chose to do, was to stick to our mission. To keep our product so far as we could pure.
Among the most difficult groups of our customers to uphold this purity of product with, was people who came for a management meeting, a think-tank, or a training course. The very people we had originally aimed our product at and the very people who, we thought, would afford us the least trouble. The problem is that with many such people, the last thing they want, is to be here.
We had some experience from our more regular hotel-type guests, of truculence in the face of uncertainty, of being overly demanding, or complaining that something was not right, or doing something naughty, like spilling red wine on the carpet, when mummy and daddy (ie us) had gone out and they were playing up the babysitter (our staff). With a training course, a similar attitude can prevail, but the person playing the babysitter role is the trainer. We do not play too much part directly in the ensuing pastiche, except that the general negative attitude can spin off onto us and what we do. Among our earlier large corporate customers were the branch managers an international fast-food chain, in whose shops, if you were to ask for chicken and chips, you would perhaps be looked at very askance, since though they are a fast-food chain, they do not at all sell chicken and chips.
The first time they came to us for a training course, we sent sample menus beforehand to the organiser for approval, as was our custom, and these were approved. It happened that Hilary and I were both away when this group of managers arrived and they were welcomed by Rebecca and her team. When I got back on the first evening, Rebecca and the staff were in a state of great anxiety. Absolutely nothing had been right, and especially not the food. Lunch had not gone well. It had consisted of baked potatoes, hummous, guacamole, cheese, carrot and poppy-seed salad, mushrooms marinated in olive oil and herbs, and a large bowl of mixed green leaves. In addition, we had laid out a few slices of ham, for anyone of a conservative frame of mind, for whom potatoes and salad might be a bit too high a hoop to jump.
The ham had gone, and the people had asked for more ’am, and there was no more, and none of the other food had been touched. The guests were unhappy that we were out of ’am, which was a bit perverse, since ham had not been on the original agreement for lunch, we just thought we would put out a few slices as a kindly add-on for the unreconstructed among them, if there were any. But &rquo;am was all they were prepared to eat, so they left the table hungry and unhappy.
Evening came, and we put out a menu for dinner, again as had been agreed with the organiser. Twenty minutes later came a knock on the kitchen door. It was the trainer. Her charges were not happy. Would it be possible for them to be cooked some chicken and chips. That was what they wanted: chicken and chips. Please. The trainer, as befitted her job, was practising what she preached and being very assertive. Mark the chef agreed to cook them some chicken, but the chips part was more difficult as we do not have a deep-fat fryer and Mark did not really have enough time to start improvising. So he met them half way, which did not seem to go down as well as it might have.
It was at about this time that I arrived back on the scene, to find the staff in a state of grave concern and agitation. Nothing was going right. The guests were unhappy and dissatisfied and there did not seem to be any obvious way of consoling them. Whatever they wanted, it seemed we did not provide it.
I pondered the situation, and was given a clue as to what might be going on by a comment from Mark, who had happened to be using the gents’ toilet earlier at the same time as one of the guests. “How’s it going?”, asked Mark, as he would, as a matter of politeness and to confirm that the participants were gaining something beneficial from their visit and his cooking.
“I don’t like it here. I don’t like being in this dead out-of-the way hole. I don’t want to be doing all this touchy-feely training rubbish, and I don’t like being fed all your fancy food. So now you know!” And he finished his wee and left, without washing his hands.
Mark was still upset by this when I arrived back just before dinner. But hold on a minute. This is an innovative international fast-food company. What is all this about demanding chicken and chips. About refusing to eat anything but ’am. Their own customers would not be allowed to get away with that. There must be another agenda here.
Which of course, there was. The participants were playing up the trainer. They had reverted to being naughty children because they did not agree with being made to take part in what they saw as unnecessarily emotional training with a slicker from the poncy south. It was not our problem at all really, it was simply an extreme case of truculence in the face of the frightening. There, there, Mark, it’s not your fault.
The following morning the theory that we had consoled ourselves with in the kitchen the evening before was borne out even stronger. External outward-bound style management team trainers had arranged to arrive a 8.15, for an 8.30 start, and at 8.20 the participants were just beginning to drift in for breakfast. They refused to budge until they had eaten their breakfast, and even then, something was not right. The packed lunches we had prepared for their day out had a serious shortcoming. Not enough to drink. They could not go out for the day with these tiddly drinks. No, the day was off unless there was a pub available at lunch time, and that was that!
Which, actually, it was not, because we were able to produce enough mineral water in litre plastic bottles for them to take one, or two if they wanted, each. Right, two litres of water each. That’s enough. Let’s go!
No. Some of us cannot go canoeing, we are afraid of water. And others cannot possibly do abseiling, they are terrified of heights. Terrified. Terrified. We want to stay here.
It was past 10 am before the trainers eventually managed to get their charges out of the door, and what they did with them thereafter we do not know, our next contact occurred at 2 pm when the participants began to drift back in, some two hours earlier than schedule. Most jumped straight into their cars and screeched away, but one woman asked if she might have a shower before she went home. Sure, of course you can.
About an hour later that she reappeared, having at last washed the final vestiges of the nasty countryside off her body – we had begun to be concerned that she might have drowned – and she, too, then hopped in her motorcar and screeched off down the drive. We never saw the trainers, who had presumably stayed on the mountainside to cry.
When we next checked the dustbins, we saw the packs of barely-nibbled packed lunches. Well, you win some lose some, though in fact, we did not lose in every sense of the word, since this particular corporate customer of ours continued to come back for more fancy food in this dead, out-of-the-way, hole. Stick to your product, just like they do. It pays in the long run.
Of course a focus on a particular product does not necessarily stop people who are not part of that product from stopping by to see whether you have a room. In fact, we have found that a strong and identifiable presence actually encourages the passing trade. For all the advice you get on marketing, from a glossy colour brochure to shortbread biscuits by the bed, that the tourism authorities tell you about if you give them half a chance, we have found that nothing works half so well as a few Mercedes in the car park, the newer and shinier the better. Whenever we have a group of company managers in, their this-year’s company cars with the leather seats and radio controls on the steering wheel crammed un-uniformly in our car park, we can expect to find someone standing in the hall from time-to-time, asking if we do lunch, as, “It looks so nice here”.
Similarly, if there is a group of guests who have some type of identifiable interest, perhaps they might be a re-enactment society, all dressed in authentic clothes of la Belle Epoque, the requesters after lunch will be found lurking on the doorstep.
One of our regular groups of customers were cross-dressers. They are all middle-aged married couples and for some reason, presumably just a convention among them that has grown up over the years, the men tend to come down to dinner dressed as women.
One evening when the members of this particular group of guests were having a pre-dinner drink, one of their party brought through to our office another man, not part of their group, who had arrived asking if there was a chance of a room for the night. The first person he had come across upon entering the house was a large, rather sweaty and hairy, ex- rugby player, wearing a pink dress in a style rather akin to that of a fairy on the Christmas tree, with an especially flouncy and horizontal pink tutu. I did not think it was necessary to go into the reasons for this, and simply explained to the visitor that we were not a hotel of the conventional sort, and did not have rooms for the night as such. As a matter of courtesy, though, since it was a Saturday night and getting rather late, I asked him, “Can I see whether anywhere else has vacancies for you? I can try telephoning. What sort of place do you like? A B&B, Non-smoking? Own bathroom?”
The man thought for some time, he looked like he might be wanting to say something, and eventually he did: “What I’d really like”, he sighed slowly and at length, &ldqwuo;Is to stay here. I like it here!” There are many different ways of marketing your product, some not terribly clearly laid out in the textbooks.
A MISSION CAN BE HARD to cling on to, but clung on to it must be, remembering all the time that a mission is about tomorrow. What is going to happen tomorrow, and how can we lock into that? Or even, taking a leaf from the James Hudson Taylor book, how can we determine that?
We bought our hotel knowing that it was too small and in too sparsely populated an area to make a profit from a conventional approach to the business. Why would anyone want to come to stay here? There seemed to be five standard answers to this question. First, they would come to walk in the countryside. Second, they might come to enjoy the high-quality food. Third, they might have business in the area. Fourth, they might use it as a base for touring, and fifth, they may be breaking a journey on their way to somewhere else.
All very well, but only one of these – the second – stands any chance of sustaining a consistent clientele in an area where people and businesses are thin on the ground. Walkers, tourers, and people on their way to somewhere else are seasonal and concentrated into the weekends. In the conventional scheme of things, only by turning ourselves into a desirable restaurant attracting customers from a broad area could we expect to do anything but go gradually bust. To make a restaurant desirable, it would need to be regional, or specialist, or eccentric, and have a fair number of covers to buffer the nights when, despite all best efforts, there were only a few people in. It would need to consume the place.
Alternatively, we could look to the future, and go for developing a vertical market. Never having planned to run a restaurant, this is what we decided to do. First, though, we were too small, we would have to build an extension.
Stage one of building an extension: planning permission. We had taken some precautions regarding this, and bought a property which already had been granted permission to extend. We required a different configuration, with less emphasis on workshop space for repairing motor bikes than had been in the original scheme, and so had to submit our plans again.
The Yorkshire Dales National Park, who constitute our local planning authority, did not like it. Essentially, they work under a principle of No Change. Practically any attempt to develop, they oppose, except for those developments which they consider to be commensurate with their image of how the National Park should be. A National Park in the UK should be traditional farming and cottage industries, it should most certainly not be about new ideas, and we came firmly under the category of new ideas.
The effect of their well-meaning dogma tends to be, as so often with dogma, the exact opposite of what was intended. Farming, you see, is Good. Farmers are not therefore under the jurisdiction of the National Park authority provided they use their land for agricultural purposes. In the first few years that we were in our new-found home, the local farmer demolished most of the ancient stone walls and moved increasingly to a system of ranching, of putting a large number of sheep into the wide open spaces created by the newly-combined fields, leaving them there until the ground was depleted, then moving them on to the next wide open space. He owned enough land to allow the now wrecked field, after a sprinkling of dung, to grow up some grass and weeds again, ready for next year’s batch of peripatetic sheep.
The drainage in the field was clearly getting worse and worse, which generated complaints from the farmer about how our ducks were getting into his field and creating a mud dam. “Yes, yes”, we said, “We’ll repair the fence.” Which we did.
The ecological disaster occurred not long after, though not in a way that we could be blamed for, or at least not so far as we know. After years of overgrazing on the hills, overgrazing which everybody knew about but which the authorities had no power to control, the mix of vegetation had become diminished, allowing only the toughest type of grass to continue to grow. This particular grass was the home to the larvae of a variety of moth, which finding itself alone, with no predators to bother it, since the predators’ habitat had been all but wiped out, chomped its way voraciously through the grass before the sheep had a chance to get a look in. The farmers were angered. What will we do?, they demanded. The government must do something. This is a disaster affecting our livelihood. The countryside will turn into a desert if something is not done urgently!
Meanwhile, the National Park authorities, they whose remit was to maintain our national countryside heritage, were carefully trying to ensure that nobody made any alterations to their house, including in their nobody, in this consideration, us.
In our case, planning permission to extend had been granted some time ago, so the principle of extending was not a subject for dispute, only the look of what was built. Detailed plans had to be submitted to the planner. He did not like them. Essentially there were three problems. The size of the extension was too great. The roof line was not acceptable. And the windows were too big.
From our point of view, each of these issues had been carefully considered with the view to making the extended part of the building look in keeping with the old. We had sized it to be in proportion, not jutting out anywhere and not looking like an appendage, of a length proportional to the existing building. We had asked for the roof line to be of the same pitch and materials as the existing roof, and we had asked for the windows to be in proportion to those of the existing building. But no, the extension must look like a barn. Barns are farming. Barns are Good. The extension must look like a barn. There nver had been a barn in this spot. But barns are Farming. Barns are Good.
So we had to build it with a mis-matching roof, with windows that made a pretence of not being there at all, and of a length nine feet shorter than we wanted, which meant that our ground floor bedroom, fully kitted out for access by someone in a wheelchair, would have to be a cramped single rather than a double.
The most galling thing about this piece of planning stupidity would lie in the future, when the planner had moved on up his career ladder, and we had to deal with the perplexed looks of visitor after visitor. “I suppose you couldn’t afford to make the roof line match the rest of the house. Pity.”
We could have fought it, but we were in a weak position. Nigel, who ran the nursing home opposite, was much better placed. He was going through the planning process at the same time as us, in order to erect a conservatory and so make a light, bright, sitting room with views over the hills for use by the residents. He, too, was careful to have something designed which fitted-in with the setting of the house, something which, when it was completed, would look like it had been there for ever. Of course it was turned down outright. But a nursing home owned by someone who has lived in the area all his life has a trump card. The trump card is called a Site Visit, attended by the planners, and other interested parties who may have a say in the matter. Among the assembled dignitaries it is important to include the vicar, who sheds a tear for the plight of the elderly folk, and a parish councillor, who does likewise. Then the planning permission is allowed to go through. We, however, had no such prerogative. The best we could do was to engage an experienced architect, who used a very fat pencil to draw the window outlines on the plans, which the builder worked to the outer edges of. When we were told by the planners to paint the drainage pipes black, when those of the rest of the house were their original dark green, we quite simply refused on the grounds of just a modicum of taste. Pipes on barns, you see, are coloured black.
The mania that the National Park planners have to see everything in terms of the past is their undoing. The past is fine for living out your holiday home fantasy, it is not very practical for living in. The effect is that people bend and break the rules to whatever extent they can get away with, and one sees the most hideous and inappropriate house modifications going on, quite out of keeping with the style of the area. It is just a matter of what you can get away with. A plan for the future would help so much.
And to cap it all, on the ridge of our new ersatz barn, we were required to erect a little chimney. No smoke ever emanated from this chimney, nor ever would it as the chimney was not connected to anything. With our by this time resigned approval, Alan the builder erected a little hat on top of the chimney in the hope of showing the world that it wasn’t our fault. If it was going to look stupid, it might as well look really stupid.
But at least we had en extension. We were bigger. We could start attracting more custom. There was just one further obstacle to overcome – we had to pay for it.
Living in an area of official deprivation has some advantages in that access to grant money is more readily available. To ease our cost burden slightly, we would apply for a grant. The cost burden would only be slightly eased, because it is not usually possible to obtain grant money to pay for the whole of a thing, only for a percentage of it. It our case, this was calculated by the officials at just under 10 per cent, which was not going to affect a decision to proceed, (though the authorities seemed to believe that that was the point of the grant), but at the same time was not to be sniffed at. So we sent for the forms and filled them in.
An acceptance of our application was duly and gratefully received by us, with conditions attached. Most of these we were going to fulfil anyway, for example the use of high-quality materials and building in line with the agreement of the planning authorities, but there was one item on the list that we knew was going to cause a bit of trouble. Since we were, to all intents of the grant administrators, a hotel, they required that before the money would be paid over we should be granted English Tourist Board three crown status for the new rooms we had built on.
This was all very well, and in the normal scheme of things would have been no more onerous than the other conditions that we planned to fulfil anyway, except that we knew that our marketing, once the extension was completed, would be to a specialised market sector. It would not be possible for someone to turn up at the door and say, “Got a room for the night, guv?”, and the someone for whom this would not be possible would include the hotels inspector.
The extension was duly completed, the final application sent in, and the grant conditions scrutinised. “For the final grant payment to be made, would you please confirm that you have been accredited with English Tourist Board three-crown status, as identified in our offer letter dated . . .”
“Ah, well. We have a problem there, you see, because if we register with the English Tourist Board as a hotel, their inspector will want to come and inspect, and this arrival will be unannounced, and since we are not open for guests who have not pre-booked, we shall have to turn the inspector away, which means we will not get inspected, and so not accredited, even though we are indeed of a standard that is commensurate with three-crown status. It is a question of marketing focus, you see, which does not quite fit with the system. That’s generally considered worthy in marketing terms, we are told. Unique selling points, and all that. Good for the economy of the region.”
“Well, OK. Can you just ask them to come and inspect anyway, and grant you the status as if you were a standard hotel, even though you are not. That will be perfectly acceptable to us.”
So we did ask, eventually having to reach quite a senior level in the tourism authority, it being a somewhat unprecedented request, wanting an accreditation that, having got, you intended to do nothing with, and especially not to use as an identifier in the hotel guide handbook.
At length: “Well, you just pay the fee, our inspector will call, and then if the standard of your accommodation is as good as you say it is, you will have no problem.”
“Oh yes we will. Two problems. First the inspector will find himself or herself turned away, and second and most importantly, it is absolutely essential for us that we do not appear in your guide book, both from our point of view, not wishing to appear to have advertised on false pretences, and from your point of view, not wishing you to have appeared to do the same.”
“Well if you don't want to be in the guide book, what are you asking for a status accreditation for?”
“Because we need it to get our grant, and if we aren’t able to fulfil the criteria for the grant we’ll create a fuss, and it could look publicly embarrassing for the Rural Development Commission to have reneged on a promise for the sake of a bureaucratic contortion, as they are no doubt suitably aware.”
Eventually the Rural Development Commission wrote to the English Tourist Board something along the lines of: “Let’s just get these nutcases out of our hair, can we?”, and the English Tourist Board agreed that if we filled in some forms and sent them £75 they would see what they could do, and we duly complied, writing in big letters across the form, DO NOT PUT THIS ESTABLISHMENT IN THE GUIDE BOOK, so generating some more perplexed telephone calls from clerks whose job it was to administer the system, and eventually the inspector made an appointment and came round to see us.
Thereafter, all was well. The inspector agreed that we were up to the required standard, and composed a letter to the Rural Development Commission along the lines of: “This establishment not being a hotel, we are unable to afford them accreditation as a hotel, but it is our opinion that, if in the future they ever were to become a hotel, then the accreditation might be expected to be somewhere in the region of three crowns, subject to inspection at the time.” And that did the trick.
Contortions, contortions. It seemed that from the very beginning, we had been in a state of battle with the authorities, over how we thought we should run our hotel, versus the way in which they thought we should run our hotel. Since we are but a sprat, and they are the official experts, there were many occasions when we questioned our own approach. Surely the experts know what they are doing. Are we just being awkward here, to our eventual cost and come-uppance?
But we started getting busy. How, we could now ask ourselves, were we managing to achieve this, when most others around us seemed to be in a state of creeping emptiness? We attended meetings. The tourist authorities were concerned that less than half the serviced accommodation establishments in the country were registered with them. They must up this percentage in order to justify their continuing existence.
In order to redress their apparent decline in registrations, the tourism authorities had made what seemed to us to be a fundamental mistake, which perhaps explained why they were losing support, and perhaps explained why a large proportion of the people they represented and advised were in no better a sorry state. The mistake they made, was to undertake a survey, asking people what they want.
A questionnaire asking people what they want, is usually a bit more specific that simply asking them openly what they want. It does not say: “Tell me everything you want in life in general”, rather it will put the question something like: “When you are booking a hotel, do you find the choice you are prevented with, a) too complicated, or b) just about right, or c) too simple?&rdwuo;
Many people these days are short of time. When they want a hotel, they cannot spend hours perusing guide books and publicity brochures. They just want to get on the telephone and get it done. So they tick, ‘a) too complicated’. Quite reasonably enough.
Aha! The tourist authority has some quantifiable evidence: All our research tells us that what the customers want above all else, is simplicity. We shall reduce our classifications to just five levels. If an establishment is exemplary in facilities, cleanliness, quality of food and service, then it will have five stars. If, say, it is of the highest standard in most of these, but the food tends to come cold and the chef’s fingermarks can be seen on the crockery, then it might only be awarded three stars. And conversely, if an establishment has no private bathrooms, yet presents menus with wide choice and with ingredients of the highest quality and presentation, that too could be awarded three stars. It will make life so much simpler for people wishing to book a hotel. They will see immediately what they are letting themselves in for. Er . . .???
The officials who front the presentations for the tourist authorities do not, to our amazement, get to the ‘Er . . .???’, nothwithstanding the angry fist-shaking disapproval of other hoteliers who attend the meetings alongside us.
Questionnaires to possible customers did seem to provide the clue to what gave us the custom, when all around us were losing theirs. Rather than asking people what they wanted, we told them what they could have. All our publicity was geared to this. It said, this is what you get when you come here, in as much unequivocal detail as our English could muster. It was repeated on every page we sent out, on our web site, in every communication from the initial enquiry to the last minute panic telephone call about grandma's preferred diet. This is what you get. If that is what you want, we are the place for you. If it is not, then you would be better off going somewhere else, (though of course this last was implied rather than stated).
The approach fits entirely with the needs of the current-day busy organiser, for once the initial decision has been taken and the booking arranged, there can be no need for any more decisions. Leave it to us. We will not ask you what you want, we shall tell you what you will enjoy. No decisions – you are on holiday.
Looking around us, it seemed that those few establishments who appeared to be growing rather than shrinking were taking, knowingly or intuitively, exactly the same approach. This is what we provide. If it suits you, then good. If not, then, well, we did tell you that was what we provided. Stars? Who needs stars? What’ the point of confusing your would-be customers?
BUT WERE WE REALLY DOING all right? If the hospitality business manager came round to advise, would he say we were charging too little – after all that can be one way of getting plenty of customers.
We kept an eye on the figures, and listened to advice. One of the yardsticks that was put about, was that a hotel in the region of four-star quality, whatever that might be, should look for £30,000 per bedspace, including food and drink, per year. Not only should it look for it, the financiers would expect it. It would be a measure by which the business could be expected to produce a good enough return to its shareholders. Almost a mission, in the terms of some.
This is all very fine as an aim, but hard to get a grasp of day-by-day. How much does it equate to on a daily basis? 30,000 ÷ 365 = £82.19. Hmmm, and in reality filling every bedspace on every day of the year would amount to 100 per cent occupancy on bedspaces, which is unrealistic. At best, the aim might be 80 per cent occupancy, which makes the sum 30,000 ÷ 292 = £102.74 per person per day, plus VAT.
Our perception was, that the expectations of the customers out there was that they should be paying about half of this. And so a kind of souk had developed, especially where the customers were corporates but also where there were individual people who enjoy this sort of bargaining, where they ring round all the hotels in an attempt to get a deal. The advertised price becomes something that only the meek are subjected to. Most of the customers pay less than that, how much less depends on their negotiation skills and corporate muscle.
Is this the sort of society we want to promote? One where only the strong succeed? Eugenics rules OK? We think not. It is the world which is designed for losers. It is trying to join the underdeveloped world. Our policy was to pitch our prices at what was perceived by our customers to be a fair rate, to refuse to become involved in deals, and to say to the financiers: “We can all do that. We, too, can add up all the costs and then bung on such a percentage that short-term gain is, on paper at least, assured”. On paper the gain is assured, if the customers refuse to play the game, it is not so assured. We took a longer-term view. We wanted to keep on getting customers.
We were also wary of the idea of pricing off demand. This is the technique whereby, when you get busier, you up the prices to reduce demand. Then when you cease to be busy again, you ease them off a bit. In the long-term, just plain stupid, but a lot of places practise it. Our policy was to price to meet people’s expectations, to make them feel that had paid a fair price, or a good price, one which was worth the money.
Hotels are essentially a pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap product. To have a hotel which survived on, say, just one guest per night, would mean that that guest would have to be charged such a high price, that he or she would probably, sooner or later, think better of the scheme. The hotel could probably accommodate ten guests per night for very little increase in its costs, so each of those ten could be charged just about one tenth of what the single guest would have paid, and the hotel would be no worse off. This principle is fundamental to hotels. It is much more manageable to control the flow of a large number, than it is a small number, and the large number will bubble along if they think they are not being ripped off.
Does this mean the end of the small country hotel as we know it? It certainly seems to. The jobbing country hotel, taking a smallish number of passing trade guests, is one sector of the hospitality industry that is really struggling. Their costs are higher than their customers are prepared to pay. We, on the other hand, by promoting a specialised product, make a profit. We probably charged too little because we are soft in the head, but at least we make a profit.
And all the time, we knew we must try to keep moving forward, to look like we are in the current decade. The odd thing that we have found is, that almost every decision we took to look up-to-date was soon copied by everyone else so that it no longer looked up to date. This turned out to be an expensive reality, that we could not really afford to maintain as thoroughly as we would have liked.
IT STARTED WITH THE TYPEFACE we used for our publicity. Despite the dismissive objection of the designers we had engaged to help with our image making, we insisted upon using a font called Tekton as an identification token – something that someone seeing a piece of publicity would immediately identify with us. A mark of individuality. We chose Tekton because it has something of the feel of a schoolteacher’s handwriting, the simple, rounded letters that are used for writing on the blackboard, so they can be seen at the back of the class. This, we felt, presented the right sort of image, informal but firm.
It was against the advice of our designers, who told us it was too obscure, too weak, but we soon began to notice it creeping in to other establishments’ ads, increasingly it became no longer so obscure, in fact it became rather tediously commonplace, so we dropped it for all but writing letters to customers, where it could still be identified with us alone.
More difficult to be so flexible about, was the crockery. We inherited some crockery. It had been around for a long time, not only in our hotel, but in style in many a guesthouse and small hotel around the country. It was white, with a red and gold band round the edge of the plates, cups and saucers, a mark of its age showing when the metal elements of its decoration arced in the microwave, it had been invented before the widespread adoption of microwave ovens and it looked like it.
That crockery absolutely must be replaced, and urgently. But with what? We gave it some considered thought. Our house was Victorian and retained many of its original features. We were of a mind to develop the Victorian feel, while at the same time taking advantage of modern materials rather than true, hard to manage, antiques. We looked in the catalogues and we browsed the catering equipment shops for some crockery. Eventually, in a catering equipment suppliers in Blackpool, we spotted just the thing. Off-white, with an embossed decorative pattern around the edges. It was clean, it was modern, and it had an air of Victoriana about it. Perfect. We asked the proprietor about it.
“Well”, he said doubtfully, “We may be able to get it, but it’s a bit uncertain whether the manufacturer will have stocks. It’s not a popular line, you see, and the company who make it, well, they’re not terribly efficient, so we may have some difficulty. I’d just put a few samples on show but was planning to remove them when I got round to rearranging the shelves.”
Wonderful! Not only just what we want in terms of design, but out of the ordinary too, a mark of our individuality. Yes please!
And that was how we came to be one of the first places in the country to serve our guests their food on a crockery design called Dudson’s Aspen. Within a few years, Dudson’s Aspen had replaced plates with red and gold edges as the, see-it-everywhere, yawn, yawn, standard crockery for hotels and guest houses. We had bought ourselves into an everyday future. All we could do was periodically look at the base of our plates and feel self righteous. The Dudson company prints the year of manufacture on the base of its product so people can spot them like wine bottles. We had lots of 1993, and whenever we went out to eat, we always looked at the underside of the plates, and nobody else had 1993. So there. But it was a personal satisfaction, not so good for the business image overall, ours that is, it was unquestionably a winner for Dudson.
The next developments in hotel crockery fashion, which when we stocked up in 1993 would have been too far advanced to be acceptable to our guests, but which we had a glimmer of and perhaps should have stuck our neck out for, were bold dramatic patterns, and different crockery colours to suit what is being served. Some food looks good on white, the bright tomato-coloured dishes of Italy for example, but other combinations look weak on a white plate, even though the taste might be good. A starter of dessert pear, fennel and Parmesan cheese can wonderful with a walnut-flavoured dressing, but on a white plate it looks totally washed out. Bright varied crockery colours were next, and so off to a jumble sale goes all our perfectly clean and serviceable Dudson’s Aspen. Fashionable life? Five or six years.
The jolly, non-formal crockery regime fitted with what we perceived to be the developing style of food presentation. Every day we continued to learn a little more. Do not try to upstage anyone. Never underestimate the perception and knowledge of your guests. Do not try to compete with someone’s mother. Do not believe that all the children will go to bed quietly and on cue. These dicta inevitably lead to an ever-decreasing reliance on formality, tradition and the tourism authorities, and an ever-increasing emphasis on quality, simplicity and eclecticism.
Imagine a small hotel where the dining room floor is sweepable, the chairs and tables are sturdy and plain, and you help yourself to a range of foods, eat as little or as much as you like for a fixed price. If you want your mango kulfi first and your beetroot soup last, you can have it. If the quality of the food is good and cooked well and the menus are adventurous and you are not expected to tip the man at the door, would that not be perfect? No? Oh, well, then you’ll have to be the one who pays the high prices.
But the innovation of ours that others seemed most keen to copy was not our crockery or our font or our vision of the eating conditions of the future, it was our idea. It took a little time for this to take effect, because everyone in the hospitality industry is always protesting how well they are doing, how business is picking up this year over last, and how comfortably-off they are as a result of it all. It is when they discovered that we really were fully booked for nearly every weekend for the forthcoming nine months, that they quietly thought, “Hmmm. Maybe we should try some of that.”
The problem with copying a mission, however, occurs if you copy the manifestations of that mission, without being committed to the principles. We would have been delighted if others were to replicate our product, because we did not like having to turn potential customers away without really being able to redirect them to an alternative source of supply. A few more like us would have stimulated demand and avoided the destructive effect that a shortage of supply inevitably creates.
Why, then, was nobody, or nearly nobody, doing it? I think it was the fear of commitment to making something work unequivocally. In order to develop our successful product we had first of all to stop being a hotel. We had to come out of the guide books and refuse to take advance bookings from people wanting a bed for the night and we had to start all over again. The Perversity of Life will ensure that, if you decide to grant exclusive use of your hotel to a group of people who will be allowed to dance naked with flowers glued to their toenails, an elderly lady will call to book a single room for a fortnight spanning the dates that your group of high payers require. (Disappointingly, no group actually came up with this particular request from us, however we should of course not have been averse to accepting them if they had.)
We tried, briefly, to mix the message, and it does not work. At first, some of our groups were small and did not fill every room, and we had not yet committed ourselves to exclusive use for one group of people at a time, so there would be a party at one table in the dining room, raucously discussing the intricacies and pitfalls of personal body massage, and an upright elderly couple at another table with the husband demanding in an irritated manner of his wife, “Stop listening to them, pay attention to ME”.
And there lies the difficulty. In order to do a job, that job needs to be concentrated on, diversions are expensive. Very few establishments have shown the belief in themselves to do what we did, to identify a product and go for it. They are worried about not pleasing all the people all the time.
So we, in contrast to many, had a full booking sheet. We were not as well-off as we were before we came to this line of business, because providing a service to the public is never going to be as financially successful as being overpaid for what you do. In our previous lives, we were senior managers and consultants, we were overpaid; only moderately so, we were never clever enough to be fired with a golden handshake at frequent intervals, nor to become involved in making a great profit on shares which became part of a over-inflated company buyout. The same with our dealings over property; buying and selling things at a cost disproportionate to their actual value to society is one way to make a good living in a modern capitalist state, and we have never really been tuned in enough to see the opportunities. But still, before we bought our hospitality business, we were relatively overpaid.
And now we were not. But things could have been worse. We avoided what seemed to be the intention of the money lenders who helped us to be where we got to, which was to charge us lots of penalties for defaulting on our debts. Instead, we did what the money lenders should, by the definition of their publicity, have helped us to do, we made our business grow. Along the way, we made many mistakes, from spilling soup on the tablecloth to advertising on the local golf club’s score card. But also, along the way, we developed the reputation for taking a leaf from the book of our local ancient mentor, the father of the Quakers, George Fox, and attempting to be above all else, survivors.
The soup-spilling episode was in fact not too serious. It started when we received a call from our friend Tricia, she of the bee-filled bonnet and cream-laden scrambled eggs. Detecting that we are survivors, with an ability to deal with customers that she herself noisily would not have anything to do with, she telephoned and asked if we could take some people who, “I’m not letting stay in my house. I’ve never been so insulted. So rude. I hope you can do something with them. Arrived here a week late, shouting and complaining. I’m not letting them in. Can I send them round to you? The taxi driver is still waiting outside with them.”
“OK, Tricia, send them round. If they look like they can pay the bill, send them round.”
"Oh, they look like they can pay the bill alright. Hrmph!”
The taxi duly arrived and dumped outside our door two elderly folk, each in a state of great agitation, then screeched away with a sigh of relief that was almost audible. The elderly folk were distressed, that was obvious. What were they distressed about?
“That woman! I have never been so insulted. Never. Shouting. Shouting at us. I am so upset. Oh, so upset. And our grandson. What shall we do about our grandson? He must come to find us and we shall not be there. And that woman was so insulting to us. What can we do? Our grandson will not find us so we cannot stay here, yet that woman was so insulting we cannot stay there. But our grandson will be looking for us there. And our grandson, he will not find us. What are we to do?”
This needed Hilary’s difficult-situation handling training, and Hilary was becoming a practitioner and expert by now, no longer paying much heed to the textbooks, she just needed to find what it was, that was the key to calming the lady down. She tried all sorts. She listened, she sympathised, she showed the couple to a room, only to find them downstairs on her heels. She listened some more, but all was discordant agitation, interspersed with frequent and unpredictable bursts of inventive against Trica’s breeding and reputation. Eventually Hilary suggested a cup of tea. Can I make you a cup of tea? At least you might like a cup of tea, while we think about what to do about your grandson? The lady thought for a moment. “Do you have any whisky?”
Ah. That’s it. Now we can learn the story in a calm and rational manner. Difficult situation – solution found at last.
Over her whisky the lady explained that she and her husband had travelled down on the train from Aberdeen, and the train had arrived twenty minutes early at the station they were to alight from, so causing them to bundle their belongings unceremoniously together, with the aid of various fellow passengers, and be dumped in a dishevelled state on the platform, just in time before the train pulled out, twenty minutes early! They had got a taxi to their B&B, where they were to meet their grandson, only to be told in no uncertain terms by That Woman, that they arrived a week too late, that she had been expecting them last weekend, when they had not arrived so causing That Woman to claim she had lost a night’s booking, and now they had the audacity to turn up and demand a room, claiming it was all their fault. And she was so insulting. And now what would they do? They were expecting to meet their grandson, who was a pupil at the local public school, and who they were taking out to dinner. But when he arrived they would not be there. It was all so worrying, so much worry.
We telephoned the school and left a message for the grandson to come to our house instead. He telephoned shortly after to say, no problem, grandma, I’ve got the restaurant booked, just you and granddad, and me, and my girlfriend. “Your girlfriend!” So began another deluge of agitation and garrulous babble, needing another whisky to bring the narrative under control again.
“Who is this girl? We do not know her. Does his mother know of this? I must telephone his mother. She has said nothing about a girlfriend. Is she from a good family? How are we to find out about this girl?” And so on, while we listened, guessing, accurately as it turned out, that the grandson had been to a dance at the local girls’ public school, had picked up a suitably-attractive co-jigger, and, being at a British public boarding school, had to find every possible opportunity of getting out on a plausible excuse, so that he could try to develop the relationship or not as the case may be. Tonight would probably be only the second time he had ever set eyes on her.
What the grandson had calculated on, which was a mistake as it turned out, was that the restaurant he had selected would be able to take a booking at short notice. He had not in fact made a booking in advance as he did not want to compromise the possibility of getting the girl to come along, when he had in fact, not asked her yet. Grandparents in place and the scene all set, the grandson had received clearance from the various school authorities that the meeting was harmless enough to go ahead, had booked taxis to pick up the girl, then him, then the grandparents, and to ferry the assembled party to the restaurant which, as he now discovered at the last minute, was full and could not take them. This left him in a predicament, since boys at the local public school are not accustomed to being allowed to eat out and, having obtained a recommendation for a restaurant, he had not had the foresight to obtain a recommendation for an alternative.
So it was that he found himself at our hotel at nearly 8 pm, with his grandparents and a young woman being somewhat embarrassingly presented as his girlfriend, and a taxi waiting to whisk them away, and he with no idea where they might be whisked. So we said, “Come on, Charlie, you can’t be driving these elderly folks round the hills all night, to save making a prickly situation worse, send the taxi away and eat here.&rdquo. Which he somewhat reluctantly agreed to do.
We placed them at a table with a view of the hills, and from what we could gather the party went off well enough, the girl being from a family used to being polite in polite circles, she played the part perfectly, not too forward and not too shy. In any case, grandma and granddad did most of the talking, grandma recounting in ever-revolving detail their experience of never having been so insulted, and granddad occasionally interjecting with observations such as: “Ja, zis reminds me. It reminds me of . . . of where we live. Ja, zis reminds me of where we live. Where is it that we live?"
“Scotland, dear, we live in Scotland.”
“Ja, zis reminds me of Scotland. Ja!”
It was while being distracted by this particular snippet, losing concentration with the uncertain direction of the conversation, that I spilled the soup on the tablecloth when I should have been placing the bowl delicately in front of granddad, and aplogising and getting a clean napkin to wipe and cover up the embarrassment, but fortunately granddad did not seem to notice in the slightest.
We thought the girlfriend had done a sterling job in the circumstances, we were mightily impressed and so the following morning asked grandma and granddad what they thought of her.
“Oh! What a charming girl. Oh, so charming. Ja, we must telephone his mother immediately. Oh, what a good choice he has made. Oh, we think they will be so happy together. We must tell his mother, that she is to begin the arrangements immediately.” Grandma had them married off already. Being a well brought-up girl has its disadvantages.
And then it was time for grandma and grandad to leave. At length they had their belongings collected together in the hall, and we telephoned for a taxi to take them to the station. We were pleased to note that this was a different taxi to the one which had brought them from the station, so the driver was in a mood to be friendly, telling the elderly folk that they should sit in the taxi, not to worry about a thing, he would make sure all their belongings were put in the car for certain. He had experience of this type of customer and checked with us, before leaving the house, that all the bags were in his hands, that no mishap could possibly occur which might distress his charges on their way to the station.
“No, nothing left behind, we’re pretty sure that’s all there is”, we said, and joined him at the door, to wave our new-found friends (or that was what bthey said we were anyway) goodbye.
“Er . . . I think perhaps I should sit in that seat”, said the taxi driver to granddad, very kindly we thought, since granddad was happily ensconced in the driving seat, a smile on his face, waiting to enjoy the views on his way to the station, “Do you think you might be a bit more comfortable in the back?” “Ja, Ja, of course.”
Some years later we saw an obituary for granddad in the newspaper. He was a retired professor, three times nominated for a Nobel prize, and when he came to visit his grandson at our house he and his wife were ninety-three years old. Of course the train had not been twenty minutes early – that would be unheard of, and of course Tricia was right in her bookings record. The elderly folks were just rather ancient, and rather eccentric, but at ninety-three, travelling from Aberdeen to Cumbria to see their grandson, they were an example to us all, even if they did, despite all the panic and confusion surrounding their departure, leave an umbrella behind. At ninety-three, that is not too bad.
DESPITE THE MISTAKES AND HEADACHES, we eventually became polished, sure of our product, and, relative to the scheme of things, probably fairly professional. Was is the money lenders who helped us reach this proud state? No, it was lessons from our customers and from our dear old duckies.
When we acquired the ducks to adorn our until then bare-looking pond, they had had their wings clipped. This is done to a chick when it is very young and the idea is that by curtailing their flight they will stay with you, so avoiding a recurrence of expense in topping up the collection, and also they will not contaminate the local mallard population by introducing odd markings and motley colours, though as we observed early on, this does rely upon the ducks having a similar set of moral traditions, vis à vis the relative roles of males and females, to the deep thinkers who set the rules, a supposition that does not, in our experience, seem to stand up well to empirical analysis.
Our special friend, Mrs Grey Duck, she who had been marked out by life to be a lottery loser, had had one of her wings especially brutally mutilated, so that whereas the others could all fly a bit, Mrs Grey duck could do nothing but crash-land even on the shortest trip. We would go out into the garden in the early morning with a pot of seeds – it is necessary to feed the ducks as early as possible to dim the racket they are making, knowing as they do that there is a house full of people there and that many have a hangover – and the ducks would come running towards us. Often, in their haste, the ducks take an unwise path and so find themselves on a ledge, when the seeds are so invitingly being distributed down on the ground below them.
One after another they fly to the ground below, even those with clipped wings are mostly able to manage this without too much trouble, and even those who are really too fat to get much lift can still cope with a downhill glide. Except Mrs Grey Duck. Mrs Grey Duck cannot fly at all because she was so severely disfigured as a babe, but the food is down there and all her colleagues have gone for it, so what does she do? She goes for it too. Down onto the grass, a frenzy of futile flapping creating an ungainly descent. Roly-poly a bundle of grey feathers, beak and feet tumbling over on the grass below, then up she gets and runs towards the food still with a determined countenance.
Even when mating time is in full swing, and the male ducks do their required duty by pecking the female on the back of the neck to hold her in position, so dislodging a beakfull or two of neck feathers, and Mrs Grey Duck gets the worst of it because her wing disfigurement makes it difficult for her to get away from unwanted advances, and her neck becomes increasing bald and she goes rather lame from all the back-treading, still she limps at whatever speed she can manage towards any seeds or crusts of bread that come into view.
Mrs Grey Duck, she has been our source of spiritual uplift. The authorities have given us no inspiration at all and our friends think we are crazy. The church – well, who can take seriously an organisation that purports to be an arbiter of the country’s morals, and yet shows no inclination to campaign to abolish that prime fermenter of family strife and marital conflict – Christmas! And that Good Morning Sunday on the radio, seems to be interested in little else but sex. Mrs Grey Duck, despite all the misfortunes that life has selected her to be the target for, still keeps her pecker up. She knows the answer, and we do now, now we’ve been at it for enough years. Just remember this, she says to us, just remember this, and we do: You've Just Got to Keep on Quacking.
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