I HAVE A FRIEND who is paranoid. When you call him on the telephone he wants to know why you have not phoned him sooner. If the telephone is not ringing he believes nobody cares for him and while he is speaking on it he is constantly worried that someone else is trying to get through. However new his motor car is he will think more than twice about driving it outside his home town in case it breaks down. And he is forever worried about his health.
When we bought our hotel I thought I had better risk his wrath for not having contacted him sooner and see if there was anything to worry about that we had not yet even dreamed of. He was horrified, “But if someone is taken ill during the night, that is your problem!”
“Yes.”
“And what do you do if you are sick?”
“I can’t afford to be sick.”
“But you may be sick. You can’t help it if you are sick. You can’t just switch it off and be well – I know you think you can, but you can’t, not when you really are sick.”
“Then I put on my best smile and try not to look too pallid to the guests. I just have to work on through it. I carry a plate of breakfast into the dining room, the poached egg looking like a dismembered eye, the slice of bacon gradually unfolding like a glistening condom from the septic tank, the sausage pulsating like a sweaty fat man’s private parts, and the tomato reminding me of what I saw smiling at me from the toilet seat last night. I place it in front of the guest with a comment on the weather today, then I return gracefully to the kitchen, lean over the sink and call for Huey, then collapse into a chair, my eyes all screwed closed into a frown, my stomach groaning for me, my head throbbing, until the next guest appears for breakfast. I put on the show and try not to let the seams show.”
“Oh, and, can I ask you this? What about when people arrive who are clearly on a dirty weekend? What would you do?”
“Do you mean a man and a woman or two men or two women?”
“What! Look, hurry up, someone might be trying to get through on the phone.”
In reality, the problems of illness, death and sex are minor ones in the day-to-day running of a hotel. They are there, but their incidence in the catalogue of things that can cause you worry and pain, is tiny.
If someone is taken ill or has an accident, either you or they call a doctor. It is that simple, or it can be. We had a kitchen accident the first New Year’s Eve we were here. Caspar, a rather slender young man with a ponytail, was helping out in the kitchen while Hilary organised party games with the guests and I ran around serving food and drinks. At a quarter-to-midnight I was pouring glasses of champagne ready for the big bong, when Caspar, who was washing some glasses by hand at the sink, suddenly said, “Oh dear!”
“What is it Caspar?”
“I think I have cut myself.”
And sure enough, Caspar had somehow broken a stemmed glass at the stem and jabbed the pointed bit into his forearm. At ten-to-midnight on New Year’s Eve. We thought about driving him to the hospital, but that is twelve miles away and you cannot suddenly disappear and leave the guests to run the kitchen, so there was only one thing for it. Hilary, who by this time had come into the kitchen to make sure the champagne-pouring was going to plan, went back out among the guests and acted out the scenario she had seen on the films, now was her chance to be just like the famous actress, she asked: “Is there a doctor in the house?”
Silence for a time and then a little boy piped up, “"My dad’s a doctor”.
“Which one is your dad?”
“Him over there trying to hide behind the sofa.”
“Yes, well, ahem, I’m not really that sort of doctor.”
“Yes you are dad, you used to be a doctor.”
“Well, I, er . . ."
“Well perhaps you could at least give us a bit of moral support in the kitchen”, suggested Hilary, “where someone has had a bit of an accident.”
So the man came into the kitchen, where Caspar was by this time sitting with his head between his knees, looking pale and drained, saying, “Oh dear, I feel faint. Do you think there are fragments of glass stuck in my arm? I think I’m going to be sick. Oh dear!”
The man was wonderful. He donned disposable gloves, laid Caspar on the floor, held the cut closed with clean kitchen paper, reassured Caspar that it was perfectly natural to feel the way he did, and suggested that it might lose us nothing to try phoning the local health centre, the worst result being we would get an answerphone, in which case we would have to think again. Hilary telephoned the health centre, the local GP answered the telephone personally and said he would be right over.
And that is how it came to pass, that we saw in the first New Year of our new business, sipping a slightly delayed glass of champagne with the guests, while the local doctor, dressed in a three-piece grey suit, sewed up Caspar’s arm on the kitchen floor. The nice man who had been so calm and held the fort and Caspar’s arm until the doctor arrived, turned out to be a professor of neurology, in effect a brain surgeon. That was why he was not ‘that sort of doctor’.
Caspar’s father called to drive him home at about one o’clock in the morning and when told the story suggested that the doctor might have been more effective doing something about Caspar’s brain than his arm, which we thought was kind of him. We had thought it would be more comforting for the guests if Caspar showed his face to reassure everyone that he was all right, so after the doctor had put away his needle and thread and gone on his way we sent Caspar out among the throng, smiling warmly, his white T-shirt streaked with bloody fingermarks, and an elastoplast about half an inch long the only evidence of any damage.
If someone is taken ill, it is our problem.
And if we are ill – we go into super-trooper mode. If fact we go into super-trooper mode much of the time, ill or not. Super Trooper is a song by the pop group, Abba:
Like a super drooper
Nights are gonna find me
Shining like the sun
Laughing, having fun
Veeling like a number vun.
(Abba are Swedish).
This ability, to put on the show and make it seem like you are having fun has brought out something in us we did not know we had. And when you do it, you amaze yourself. It is a sham, but somehow, because the show must go on, it is a very effective sham. It challenges all our conceptions about openness versus deceit, and we switch it on and amaze ourselves.
Because life is perverse.
As ever, we had something to learn from our ducks. Especially Mrs Grey Duck. Shortly after we acquired our original collection of ducks, this particular grey-backed duck walked into the road and got run over by a car. Some youths who were passing kindly redirected further oncoming traffic while one of them knocked on our door and when I answered announced, “Mister, there’s an injured dook on t’road”.
The duck seemed like she might have a broken neck but we cuddled her for a while and put her into a cardboard box with some hay. A couple of days later she was still alive so we put her back on the pond. For some weeks she seemed unable to move her neck to feed, but eventually got better.
The following spring one of the other ducks produced some chicks. We had built an enclosure to keep the predators at bay. Two of the three chicks had survived and were doing well. Then Mrs Grey Duck produced twelve chicks and we got her and them into the enclosure too. The next day, there was suddenly an unseasonable cold snap in the weather and Mrs Grey Duck’s young chicks all died. So Mrs Grey Duck lost all her chicks, while the other duck’s chicks went from strength to strength. In our menagerie, Mrs Grey Duck is an unlucky ducky. It is nature – a lottery. In fact, Mrs Grey Duck carefully nurtures her eggs and produces a brood of chicks every year. Then the weather either turns very cold or very wet during the first few days of their life and they die. Mrs Grey Duck is a lottery loser. Perhaps Mrs Grey Duck has done something wicked in a past life and is being punished for her sins. Perhaps Mrs Grey Duck was incarnated as Albert, whose wife attended a seance shortly after his death, made contact with his spirit, and asked him what it was like being in heaven.
“Oh, it’s very pleasant. I wake in the morning and have a swim before breakfast, then I sit in the sun for a while and do a few more lengths before lunch, then a bit more lounging followed by another little dip in the pool before tea . . .”
“You know it’s very odd, Albert, because you used to hate going swimming when you were alive, I could never get you into the water.”
“Yes, well I wasn’t a duck then, was I?”
But I am reminded of the story of Harry Houdini, the escapologist. He lived at a time when seances were all the rage and was not convinced by them. His friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a great believer and once encouraged Houdini to participate in a seance in which the medium, Mrs Conan Doyle, seemed to be undertaking automatic writing directed by the spirit of Houdini’s dead mother. Houdini was not convinced, however, for he knew something the medium did not know, which was that his mother, when alive, spoke practically no English.
There are times when we wonder why this should happen to us, why we are made so aware of the perverse lottery nature of life, when to others the phenomenon is less apparent. Why, furthermore, was this feature of life so hidden from us before we came to run our establishment? The simple answer is that in the past we were, like so many people are, sheltered from it. Our life was cosseted by a steady job, steady income, steady behaviour from day to day. We did not wake up in the morning to find ourselves suddenly not what we were the day before, from being a comfortable middle class couple, we did not find to our surprise one morning that we woke up the receptionist and bouncer in a Soho gambling club. Never did this happen. We woke in the morning and went off to the same work as the day before.
Running your own business, especially one which is not easily viable, changes your world from one of bounded comfort to one of permanent change and uncertainty. From being a burgher of the middle classes, you become akin to a family on the bottom of the social class heap, where things happen out there over which you have little or no control, which can suddenly find you wallowing in unexpected sunshine, or destitution and hopelessness. This is the phenomenon of change that is a feature of the age and is, we are assured by all the experts, a feature of business life for the foreseeable future. You have to able to adapt to a permanent state of chaos and white water, trusting yourself that you can succeed against all the obstacles placed in your way by the uncertainty and perversity of life.
But that is not to say that you should not do all you can to fight it. After all, we are human beings, we can arrange things so that we are not at the mercy of every ill wind that blows. It took us some time – too long, really – to see that the key lay in setting ourselves on a proper business footing by becoming properly staffed up. We began by doing everything ourselves, we could have continued in this way as so many small hospitality establishments do. And we would have remained at the mercy of every crises that life threw at us, with no time or opportunity for growth, as tends to be the lot of these same small hospitality establishments.
It is difficult, because until you take on the staff, you cannot grow properly, but until you begin to gain more business, you cannot afford to take on the staff. We chose to risk the money. Business is risk. Similarly, one needs a certain amount of technology to smooth the humps, this is expensive and its payback-time may be hard to measure.
I HAVE INVENTED A GADGET, so useful, so obvious and so easy to manufacture, it is extraordinary that nobody has thought of it before me and marketed it. It is a remote control device, like those used on televisions and videos etc, but this one controls your telephone answering machine. In the answerphone a number of messages are stored, and you select which you want at any given moment by pointing the remote control device and firing. One of the pre-programmed messages says, “Congratulations, we have just sat down to dinner and you are the first person to call for hhh hours and mmm minutes, but the moment we sit down to dinner the phone rings, and you are the honoured person who has ensured that life stays so comfortingly ordered and predictable”. The hhh and mmm are filled-in automatically by the machine. Why has no one ever made such a useful gadget available?
Before we bought our hotel, the incidence when such a system would have useful was considerable. We could not believe how it happened so often and eventually had to laugh about it, putting it down to one of those mysteries about the world which we would probably never get to the scientific basis of. In the hotel, of course, we could use the machine twice as effectively, once when we sit down to our own dinner and another for when we are just in the middle of serving the guests theirs.
If you know nothing of the running of a hotel it can seem that about half-past-seven in the evening is a good time to ring, not too early, not too late. It just happens to be our busiest dinner serving time, though we have had the eerie and uncanny experience on more than one occasion that if we happened to be serving dinner later, the calls come later.
We are down to earth people with no particular mystic axe to grind one way or the other. We also tend to believe that there is an explanation for everything, if only you can find it. This phenomenon of someone subconsciously knowing that you have just placed a dish of hot food on the table, we are still searching with curiosity for the meaning behind. I cannot find anything about it in the encyclopaedia.
Without my clever gadget, there is a great temptation, when the grill is just browning the meat and the carrots are just done nicely and the potatoes are ready on serving dishes and the telephone rings, to absent-mindedly pick it up and answer it.
“Hello, is that the, er . . . Oakdeeeeeeeeeeeeen?"
“Yesitis.” You have become acutely aware that the customer’s dinner is getting cold.
“Oh, my name is, er . . . Fraaaaazerrrrrrrr. And I was, er, wonnnndering, whether. You, er, happened by any chance at all, and I know it is short notice, but my wife has er . . . just reminded me of the date, . . . er, if you have a, er . . ., twin-, er . . . bedded rooooom . . . for the nights of, er, now let me see, I think it is the er, 9th and the 10th . . . Of June. No. Wait a moment. Correction. Er . . . Correction. Friday the 11th and, er . . . Saturday the, er . . . 12th of June. That is Friday and Saturday fortnight, the 11th and 12th. Of June. For my wife and myself, who are expecting to be travelling up by car from . . .”
Aaaargh!. And the chef has been handed the dishes and beckoned to get running out into the dining room and give them to whoever looks hopeful and hungry and you remind yourself that, whoever invented the answerphone, was a genius who deserves a free meal.
Some people are upset by electronic answering machines but that attitude will diminish as the answerphone’s civilised and public-spirited nature becomes better known, and as wanting an instant response from a human being who is required to stop what they are doing to attend to your demands is seen as intrinsically arrogant.
IT IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to run a hotel by yourself. There needs to be at least two people on site. Otherwise, just going to the lavatory becomes a logistical problem though not half as severe a problem as changing your clothes. Never, never take all your clothes off. Instead, change in discrete chunks that can be completed in a couple of seconds and which leave you looking relatively presentable. The reason for this is, that the moment you take your trousers off, someone will ring the doorbell, or reception bell, or telephone. We quickly learned to take on the perversity of the world and win, by organising our dressing and undressing routine.
If we liked the idea of mysticism, we would probably read all sort of meaning into the amusing regularity with which someone calls the moment you sit down to dinner, or the moment you get undressed, or the moment someone has just called on the telephone so you are already on the phone. You could find it spooky.
I grew up living on the number 73 bus route in London, and it was a local bitter joke that number 73s always came along in bunches – the bitter part came after you had just missed the last one in a bunch on so many occasions. As I have grown older and wiser I have come to see that not only number 73 buses, but lots of other things come along in bunches, too. There is a kind of bunching law about the world, such that nothing happens for a while, and then everything happens. It don't rayen but it rayen hard, as they are reputed to say in Jamaica.
This sounds like one of those ‘sod’s law’ stories that ageing boy scouts have a tndency to like telling you about, but is quite simply reality. Things do tend to bunch, that is the way of it. We find the whole thing perennially amusing now we have come to the realisation that it is not us, it is it. Sitting down to dinner and the telephone rings or someone arrives at the door, when activity has been slack to non-existent for the past three hours, is so common, so frequent, that we give a hollow cheer when it happens once again. It reinforces the religion of perversity.
The way round it is through the use of technology. Bunching is the reality; people’s behaviour can be predictably perverse. Bunching is a problem. Perverse behaviour is a problem. How do you cope with a technical problem? Through the use of technology. Technology rules the future. One of the first examples that we implemented was a keypad to allow people get in the front door after we had gone to bed at night. We first got this idea while on holiday in France. We were staying in a large, ghostly, gothic chateau and had been told that no dinner would be available that evening because it was the chef’s night off. After a fine walk in the pine-clad hills we got back to the car as it started to rain heavily and get dark, so we curtailed our intention to go back to the hotel to change our clothes and dived into what turned out to be an excellent restaurant with long French waits between the courses. Eventually arriving back at the chateau at about midnight, still in pouring rain, we found it in complete darkness and locked. What were we to do? After sploshing around in the puddles searching for a clue, looking in all the windows, knocking on all the doors, we eventually discovered tucked into the main door jamb an envelope marked, ‘M. Collier’. Inside was a slip of paper with a number on it. Aha!, somewhere, perhaps, is a keypad, and sure enough, there it is! We keyed in the number, there was a click and the big wooden front door slowly creaked open, clearing our way into the dimly-lit hall. We were the only people staying in the chateau that night and found our way to our room along the empty, silent corridors. Ever since that experience, I have wanted a house with a keypad.
With a keypad entry, you do not have to stay up all night waiting for the guests to come in. Before we had ours installed, we had a number of occasions of guests being accidentally locked out. One of the first of these was just before Christmas, when a couple were staying, each going to their respective company’s Christmas party, though they worked for different companies. We had arranged that the front door would be left unlocked and that the last one in should drop the latch.
At about 2 am we were woken by sounds from the garden. I pulled on my shirt and trousers and went to investigate. Outside the house, unable to get in, was the female member of the couple. She had got into the house OK, the front door was still open, but she knew she must be last back and that her husband was in there asleep because the door to her room was locked and the arrangement was that last one in locks the door, and she had been throwing stones at their bedroom window to wake him up, but with no success, though mercifully with no success in breaking the window either. Upon checking for their room key, we found it was still there sitting on the reception desk, so we between us surmised he must have gone to bed and locked the door and now be fast asleep in a drunken stupor – that was her theory anyway. With slightly inebriated Mrs grinning in tow, I went to investigate the mystery. We opened the door to their room with the key – empty! She was sure he was in, though. Was he in one of the other rooms? Checking the other rooms and hearing sounds of snoring coming from one that was supposed to be empty, she guessed what had happened. Her husband had come in drunk, not been able to find the room key in front of his eyes, thought his wife had come in before him and locked their bedroom door, had dutifully locked the main front door behind him, and, not being able to get into his own bedroom, gone to sleep in the first empty room he could find with an unlocked door. Throwing stones at the window had failed to wake him because she was throwing stones at the wrong window! Hahaha, what a wheeze! Never mind, she said, let me in that room and we’ll use that one instead. So I did, and she went in, and then I thought, “Oh no!, what if it isn’t him!”. But no sounds came from the room so I still did’t know. They were both together at breakfast looking rather distant and they seemed to go away happy enough, so I still don’t know.
As yet, we have not found a machine that opens the front door with a ghostly creak when you key the number in, which is a pity.
Of course, keypads and technology are all very well, but just because the people who invent them are technically proficient does not mean that all the world is technically proficient. There are two sorts of people in the world: those who can make a machine work and those who cannot make a machine work. The machine can be as simple a thing as a door latch. We often get complaints that people have had the greatest trouble with our keypad, that they have had to key in the number numerous times and have been on the point of throwing stones at all the windows before the thing could be induced to open. In this, we are like the repair man who cannot find a fault with the machine. I have tried the mechanism thousands of times and cannot make it do anything but function perfectly. But there is obviously something in its design that upsets human-machine interaction fundamentals. Probably, if the manufacturers had introduced the ghostly creak door-opening facility as the French did, all would be well – no style, these British designers, no wonder the country is going to the dogs.
Another technological improvement we introduced at an early stage was the room telephone. Installing direct-dial telephones in every room is increasingly becoming a must for hotels. It can be a significant selling point for guest houses and B&Bs too, provided you do not make the mistake of trying to recoup your investment by hiking up the price of the calls. You do not do this for the bed, the teapot, the television, why do it for the telephone? Only dinosaur hotels would be stupid enough to think that is a sensible strategy.
Notice that this advice is in direct contrast to that which will be offered by the telephone system salesman and by the tourism authorities and major guidebook publishers. They seem to think it is quite acceptable to set prices such that the capital cost of the system should be recovered during the write-down period (three to five years depending on the advice of your accountant). This is quite bizarre, really, for apart from the telephone being just another piece of room furniture, if you set the call price too high people will simply avoid using it. They will use their mobile phone if they have one or go out and use a public telephone. If they do use the overpriced room telephone they will feel ripped-off and resentful when it comes to paying the bill, so for the sake of a couple of pounds you have diminished an amount of goodwill and still gone practically nowhere towards paying off the loan on the equipment. The telephone, these days, is like a bathroom. It is a piece of furniture. You need it. (The 1990s, when we had our telephone system installed, was bore the explosion in mobile-phone use – most people didn’'t have a mobile, then.)
We discovered, when we had installed our multi-line telephone system, that telephone calls really are like number 73 buses. They really do bunch. For hours, the telephones are silent. Then one rings, you pick it up and another one is ringing simultaneously. Extraordinary business. Telephone answering machines are the solution that deals with it.
SHORTLY AFTER WE CAME TO OUR HOTEL and had installed our room telephone system, the facility was introduced where someone can, by dialling a number on their telephone, find the telephone number of the last person who called them. This can be useful if you get to the telephone just as it stops ringing – a technological innovation that has real human-machine interaction realities built in, in other words the machine works in a way that takes full account of the real world.
Most hotel telephone systems will enable this to be blocked from the hotel bedroom, so people cannot snoop on the calls of the person who occupied the room before them, but this control does not necessarily work the other way round.
One day the telephone rang, and when I answered it a horsey female voice said: “Returning your call!”.
“Er . . . I don’t think I called you, what number did you want?*rdquo;
She reeled off the number she had called, and sure enough it was ours, which I confirmed to her.
“You called me, what do you want?”, she asked shrilly and abruptly.
I was puzzled for a few moments, but then I suddenly twigged, “Oh, I see what’s happened, you see, we are a hotel and . . .”
“A hotel, we are not a hotel, if you want the number of the Falcon hotel I can give it to you, but I don't see why you should be calling us, we are not a hotel, nor should we be a free information service. Why were you calling us if you wanted a hotel? I . . .”
“Whoaah!” A flash of inspiration and it worked. The horsey voice behaved like a horse and stopped immediately. “No, no, no. I didn&rquo;t call you, it is we who are a hotel and one of our guests called you on their room telephone.”
“One of your guests? Who? What did they want? Why are they calling here?. Your guests? Who are they? . . .I don’t know anyone in your hotel. Where did you say you were? What do th . . .”
“Whoaah!” It worked again. “One of our guests called you on their room telephone. I don’t know which one it was because I wasn’t in the room at the time”
“Well, who? What did they want? Where did you say you were? Are you in Scotland? I have some friends who are away at the moment in Scotland. Where did you say you were? It can’t be them because they’re not in your part of the country and . . .”
“Whoaah!” I am getting good at this. “If you tell me where you are in the country, I might have a clue who called you.”
“We’re in Stroud, but I don’t see what that has to do with it. I don’t know why you are calling me and I really don’t see why I should be given you information about where I . . .”
“Whoaah!” And again. “Yes! We do have some guests from Stroud. Could it be Mr and Mrs Stuart?”
“Who?”
“Stuart, Mr and Mrs Stuart. They are from near Stroud, I believe.”
“Oh!” A pause in the flow at last. The flow had been noticeably curtailed. “Oh!”, and then, “But I’m . . . Oh . . . But this is . . . I think I know . . .”. A gasp of sudden realisation. Oh dear, I think I have got the set-up too. I shouldn’t have given the ‘couple’s’ name. They don’t tell you that in the hotelier’s instruction book. Not such a positive use, then, for the wonders of modern technology.
Generally, though, the telephone has become an intuitive instrument, only really a problem now to people with number dyslexia (technically called dyscalculia, but we try to write half-understandable English and so avoid words like that). These are the people who get two of the numbers reversed and, since they tend to be the sort of people who are non-mechanical in temperament, cannot believe that what they think they have done is what they have actually done. We used to get one of these quite frequently. The telephone would ring, I would answer it and a voice would say:
“Alf?”
“No, not Alf, you’ve dialled the wrong number.”
“Oh. Can I speak to Alf then please?”
“I’m afraid you can’t. You see, Alf doesn't live here.”
“Oh. Has he moved then?”
“No, you’ve dialled the wrong number.”
“Oh. Can I speak to Mary then?”
“No, Mary doesn’t live here either.” This particular caller became almost a friend as a result of his number dyslexia, though he never would believe he had dialled the wrong number, remaining convinced that Alf’s house was full of the most weird collection of people. I found that I could say something like, “No, its seep thrug for seppentime car grits pie barbledam, you see.”, and he would say: “Oh, OK then, shall I call back later?” Which he duly would.
Alf’s friend probably did not run a hotel, because to run a hotel it is now essential to have a least some grasp of what the technology has to offer and what its limitations are.
TECHNOLOGY AND STAFF. At last, we had some staff. We had started with no one but ourselves and could, like others before us, have carried on this way in a small country hotel. Doing it all yourself has the advantage that it gets the job done properly at a very economic rate. It has the disadvantage that it becomes exceedingly difficult to change and move with the times. Do-it-yourself carries on like that until you give up or drop dead. No future.
When we first took on our hotel we advertised for help and, it being summer, got a number of responses from students. As we are in an area of genteel and expensive public schools, some of these students tended to be from well-to-do middle class families – the sort of children who were expected to get their fistfulls of ‘A’s at A-level. These young workers, though conscientious and keen, did not take to the chores of housekeeping naturally as do working-class youths. Young people from working-class families clean the rooms and do the gardening better and quicker, need less supervision, and have fewer blind-spots.
There was, for example, Jacqueline. She had a delightful upper-crust accent and was extremely bright. She looked marvellous and behaved impeccably when serving breakfast to guests, and cleaned the rooms with great determination and seriousness, smoothing out the bedcovers to a most inviting result. But we were convinced that Jacqueline was unable to bring herself to look at a toilet. She never cleaned the lavatories. We would check when she had finished cleaning the rooms and, sure enough, there had been nothing done with the toilet. We reminded Jacqueline about this on a number of occasions, but somehow, she simply could not see a toilet, a toilet was not there to be looked at.
At the other extreme, the wonderful 17-year-old Victoria, who comes from a local family, does not need her work checked. Once told, always remembered. Victoria’s main trouble is that, far from being frightened of the toilet bowl, she tips so much bleach down it that we are forever running out of the stuff. We suspect that she is probably drinking half of it to help deal with her hangovers, but no matter, the job is done and done effectively.
Victoria has style when waiting at table, too. She watches the chef preparing something in the kitchen, face full or disdain and grimace. Occasionally she exclaims, “yeughh!”, and tells the chef that it looks like something one of her friends might vomit up. Then at the right time she picks up the plate and takes it to the diners with such a lovely warm smile on her face that they could not fail to start their meal in a positive mood.
This works well until Victoria is given the job of asking the guests what they would like for dessert. She goes through the list and then someone trips her up. They say of, perhaps, the mango and ginger meringue, “Sounds wonderful. Would you recommend it?”
Victoria cannot help herself. “I wouldn’t give it to my dog“, she blurts out before she has had time to remind herself of what she learned on the training course. But very naturally and charmingly.
Eventually we had to relieve Victoria of the ordeal of taking dessert orders. A working-class girl can turn on the smile, but when it comes to telling lies – that is going too far for someone so honest and well brought-up to do, even in the course of duty.
It is Jacqueline who, when we are cooking breakfast and I am listening to the radio and impersonating dipthong-free accents, sniggers behind her hand. Victoria says an accent in an accent and we all have one. (Mine happens to be a London accent, which is full of multiple vowel-sounds, oi for I etc . . ., which is why I find the accents which seem to me to be based on a single vowel sound – the Northern Irish and the upper-class English in particular – so amusing to listen to and irresistible to imitate, for example, a Northern Irishman telling us that the problem is, “Vahrah Dahffahcahlt”, or a plummy old Englishman, whose only vowel is a kind of "ar", talking of, “The varlarnce in ar sarcartar”. Jacqueline gets the humour – and this level of intellectual perception is perhaps incompatible with being able to clean a lavatory.)
With gardening, too, we found that, while our first youth that we employed to do grass-cutting was very willing and conscientious, he was from a middle-class background and tended to come in smiling triumphantly and announce, “The lawnmower is belching smoke and not running properly.” The following year we took on the son of a mechanic at the local garage and he gave us a completely problem-free year, occasionally he could be seen with a piece of string and some bent wire dealing with a reluctant lawnmower, but for him the lawnmower, strimmer and hedge-trimmer always started when needed and ran efficiently, which they never did for me.
In our previous lives as managers in organisations, we often had to interview job applicants, we would learn the rules of interviewing techniques from the latest theories and textbooks. Not once did we come across the idea that it might be valuable to ask someone what their father and mother did for a living. It turns out to be one of the surest pointers there is. Why do the theorists not tell us this?
How, then, does one find the people to take on the hotel daily work and how does one know whether they are going to be good and fun, or will they take an age to finish anything and put the plates away with the previous customers’ eggy breakfast still stuck to them?
We approached this problem very tentatively, since there did not seem to be much guidance available. The first staff member we looked for, was a chef.
Who would ever become a chef? What sort of person? What is their motivation? Why are there more men than women? Why do they have such a reputation for being difficult and likely to storm off in a rage waving knives about?
We had a particular problem. We were attempting to focus on the quality of the food, and at the same time we had some fairly clear ideas about what the food style should be. We would need to guide the chef round to our style, which meant in effect that the non-professionals would be telling the professional what to do, while at the same time we were not too clear ourselves about exactly what this meant.
We engaged some professional chefs on contract. It did not really work out too well. One, who sold himself as an experienced chef in various styles of establishment and showed us photographs of his creations to prove it, did indeed produce visually impressive creations, but he was a smoker. This did not effect his energy at all, it affected his taste. His dishes looked wonderful, but tasted indifferent. We subsequently learned that many of the better restaurants insist that their chefs are non-smokers and we can now quite see why. We suggested to him that some of our recipes, lifted from the books of popular cookery writers, worked well, but no, he used his own, he was the professional, and the food tasted of nothing very much, being especially disappointing since the presentation was so spectacular.
Another contract chef was a committed vegetarian. His vegetables were excellent. We learned a lot about cooking vegetables to perfection from him. But his meat dishes were a mess. His heart was not in them.
What we wanted, really, we decided, was not a chef, but a cook. Someone who had a feel for the style we were attempting to project. Someone who was in tune with our philosophy and who liked cooking. You can teach someone to cook, it is much more difficult instilling in them a philosophy. We advertised for such a person, and found Mark.
Mark was training to be a counsellor. Out in these Cumbrian hills, a sizeable proportion of the population is training to be a counsellor. The area attracts would-be counsellors. The problem with this, in an area with so many budding counsellors, is there are not too many people left to counsel, so work for counsellors can be hard to come by.
Mark liked cooking. He was in tune with our food philosophy. He needed some work. We did not know it at the time, but Mark was soon to become a first-class chef, producing dishes of the quality that would not be out of place in a restaurant that gets handfuls of stars from the food critics, and delivering on time, for moderately sizeable numbers of people, and doing what all chefs must do as a matter of daily routine, which is one of the things that gives them the buzz of commitment and keeps them hooked, the ability to calmly improvise an impressive result after disaster strikes. Mark probably did not know he was to find his forte either, at the time.
A chef likes adrenaline. A chef is a producer, a finisher. A chef has the essentially masculine trait of not going off to do something else while something is being waited for, and so forgetting to deal with first thing until it is too late and it is burned. A chef is an artist. Mark also has that essential something extra – he likes good food. Except avocados. Mark does not care for avocados, he finds them too slimy. So if we serve avocados, Hilary prepares them. If someone does not like something, they can prepare them adequately, but not beautifully. That is natural.
We were still at the mercy of the Perversity of Life, because Mark was training to be a counsellor. This meant that there were certain times that he could not be available, because he was committed to attend his counselling course. These were the times that the restaurant got busy. For over a year, we had a run of paying Mark for times when the customers were not in, and doing all the work ourselves when they were. It was no joke, even though something seemed to be playing jokes with us. But we persevered and it was only really when we honed our specialisation, so that bookings were all taken in advance and we could plan according to known numbers, that this problem more-or-less disappeared. Yet again, with planning and invention, we managed to overcome life’ unerring propensity for playing silly childish practical jokes upon a person, and come out on top.
If we had been busy every night, which in an area such as this is probably unrealistic, we could have defeated the perversity by taking on a second chef, so cushioning the blows, this is how it might be done in a larger organisation. Alternatively, we could have upped the prices so that the people eating were in effect subsidising a second chef for times when no customers were occupying their seat. That would have been another way of doing it.
For us, though, who had decided against becoming a busy restaurant-with-rooms and who had decided to stick to our original aim as far as we could, the solution lay in moving increasingly towards our defined product without dilution. Once we had done this, all bookings would be advance ones and we could prepare for the times when we would be busy, but the staff were not available. That dealt with the perversity. It is not that clever, this perversity.
Or at least it dealt with the perversity as far as the chef was concerned, but then there was The Smell.
It started some time after we had built the extension to our hotel, which expense had included buying and burying a large new septic tank, a giant thing, looking like an enormous green plastic flask about three times the height of a man. Fortunately, the hole to bury this was dug by the builder with a mechanical digger, it would have taken me and my shovel for ever. The digger broke down during this process and was left in our car park over a large black oily patch for weeks before anyone found how to get it going again, but eventually we were left with just the oily patch and we had a nice new extension and septic tank.
All was well for some months, then, early in the evenings, when everyone was enjoying a drink in the bar before dinner, there would come a smell. Only in the bar, fortunately, but it would make the average person want to retch. Not everyone. Some, who had been to a boys’ public school, said it reminded them of the junior boys’ changing room, and that they found it quite comforting, but for women and for those men who had been educated in the local comprehensive, it seemed most unpleasant.
We even began to be relieved to hear a public-school accent on a guest’s arrival, a reversal of the norm, because, though ex-public schoolboys are generally charming and typically not short of a bob or two, and though they can be good in conversation having received a fair smattering of positive education, nobody has ever told them to wipe their feet. We know, the moment we hear the loud nasal tones of an accent developed in a boys’ public school, to expect muddy footprints on the carpet. The first guests to use our new extension were of this breed, in fact they were worse because, in addition to being public school educated, they were mostly policeman, and so had enormously large black boots to spread the mud about with, it was all over the brand new yellow carpets on the bedroom floors, in the hall, up and down the stairs. Had we happened to have been playing host to a group of builders’ sons, we would not have been faced with this problem, because builders’ sons are taught to do as their dad does and scrape their boots. When this particular group left and we looked at the state of the newly-laid carpets, we would have despaired and been angry, had we not become experienced by now in the silliness of life. It took Audrey the housekeeper a lot of scrubbing to get it clean, though, even so.
But what was The Smell? It was there in the evening just before dinner, and it was often there around about breakfast time. By mid-day it had faded away and during the afternoon it was seldom detectable at all. It smelled sour, like a room full of unwashed feet.
We would call the builder in a panic at breakfast time when The Smell was at its worst. By the time he arrived, it had practically gone. He thought we were exaggerating, but it was costing us a fair amount of embarrassment and free booze and discounts to keep the customers relatively sweet about it. And whatever we did, it seemed to make no difference.
First, we had the plumber replace all the U-bends in the sinks in the bar and check that all the seals and valves were tight. No difference. Then, the builder replaced all the drainpipes and vent pipes on the wall outside the bar window. Still no difference. All the floorboards were lifted. All the cabinets were taken apart and checked behind. Nothing.
Alan the builder came up with a rationale for the timing which seemed to make sense. Just before dinner, and just before breakfast, everyone was taking a shower. All that hot water, pouring down into the septic tank, was stirring up the contents and causing the generally stable state of the sludge to be disturbed, so releasing a nasty pong. But the smell should have been drawn up the vent pipes and out into the air above the house. It should not be getting into the bar area. Perhaps the tank is full or the venting system not working properly.
The tank was nowhere near full, and by dangling down into it a smoking pendulum a bit like those swung by orthodox Russian priests, Alan discovered that the venting system was working spectacularly well, smoke was diverted up to the top of the vent outlet at a dramatic pace.
What then? All the above-ground drainpipes were replaced and their seals checked, and Alan is an expert on drains, he knew that underground they were laid right – all that work underground was new, dug by his own horny hand just months earlier.
When something like this happens in a place like Sedbergh, everyone gets to know, and it causes a great deal of mirth. Old Steddy (i.e. Alan) has laid them drains wrong, and now he’s trying to find an excuse why he didn’t. And he’s supposed to be the world’s expert on drains. Ho ho ho!
This theory, that the drains had been laid all wrong, was echoed by the experts in waste water management we spoke to. Some were guests, but most were work colleagues, since I was still designing computer systems and was working on a project for experienced waste water engineers at the area’s water utility company, North West Water. They all agreed, it must be underground. The drains had been connected together wrong. Definitely.
Poor Alan, we were probably the only people who still believed in him, that the work underground was fine, that it must be something else. We knew this because of all the things that Alan might have done, he would not have made a mistake on the drains. Alan is gripped by drains, excited by drains, will regale you with stories about drains for hours if you let him, probably buys his girlfriend drain-shaped earrings for Christmas. It seemed inconceivable that Alan would have connected up the drains in anything but the most exemplary fashion. But everyone thought he had, and since drains are so special to him, they all found it a great hoot.
A remaining possibility was that the stink was leaving the vent at the top of the stack where it was supposed to, was somehow travelling down the stack and in through the thick stone wall by pressure variation, and so stinking out the bar. There is an alternative stack on the same system, so Alan put a bung in the one whose pipe runs outside the bar, to force the smell out of the other one. Still no difference. Still The Smell.
By this time, Alan was in despair. You could hear the tears forming in his eyes the moment he picked up our voice on the telephone. He was completely stumped, still asserting, that whatever it was, it was not underground.
Then one day, I was outside looking up, when someone flushed a loo in one of the bedrooms. I spotted a tiny trickle of water emanate from close to the join between the new array of pipework and the waste pipe coming out of the wall. Almost undetectable, and a tiny, tiny dribble, maybe it was not that at all, could have been something dripping from the roof. We shall experiment, when that room is next unoccupied. Which we did, and the dribble appeared again. Alan, we may have found something, get round here quick with a tube of mastic.
Mastic all round the joints. Still no good. Still The Smell. But I am not convinced. More mastic. More mastic. And that cured it, that was the end of The Smell. It had been caused by a tiny hole, too small to see even when you knew where it was, which was acting as a subsidiary vent for the septic tank, and which was located above the bar window. The Smell was getting out through this little hole, and somehow finding its way through the thick stone will and into the house behind. Alan had been right, there was nothing wrong underground, it was simply a tiny pin-hole and a leaky stone wall. That stopped the local critics, after all The Perversity of Life is one thing, but when it is demonstrated so strikingly, well, what would the vicar say? Actually, nobody locally really believed the story, they are still convinced that it must have been something else, but if it was, then there must be magic in the air, and nobody is very keen on this theory either, so they probably think we must be hiding some information to save our friend Alan from embarrassment, bet we are not. All went very swiftly quiet, and we were able to charge our customers full rate again. Phew! After six months of stinky embarrassments.
Of course, the experienced waste water engineers were not surprised. They, like all true professionals, have to deal with stupid things like this all the time.
BUT CHILDISH THOUGH THESE life-led pranks certainly are, the outcome is usually a not-too-serious one. Similarly with one’s mistakes. They can be the most time-consuming and expensive things to deal with – there is nothing more nursily caring in life than a good run of efficiency – but time and frustration are generally all you suffer, and the effect can have a salutary side.
We hosted a wedding. Many hotels say they welcome weddings since weddings have the reputation of generating lots of income. Maybe they do, but we were less keen, since the amount of work they also generate seems to us to offset the profits to too great a degree. The problem with a wedding is that too many people have too great a stake in wanting to ensure that nothing, absolutely nothing, goes wrong. And that is asking for trouble.
We did a wedding for a local couple. The couple being local and paying for most of it themselves the wedding was on a very limited budget, and the bride-to-be had the bright idea of making the wedding breakfast consist of sausage, mashed potato and baked beans.
She knew, because we had discussed it with her at great length, that when we cooked sausage, mashed potato and baked beans, the sausage would be made by Garth the local butcher, and there would be a vegetarian sausage, too, made by ourselves; the mashed potato would be Colcannon, made by Mark the chef who, as well as being an excellent chef, was also of Irish descent, so the Colcannon would be authentically exquisite; and the baked beans would not be taken from a can, we would marinade the white haricots in a trusted sauce of our own recipe.
The wedding breakfast, then, was going to taste delicious, but would the local populace, who were invited as guests, be impressed?
We hit a stroke of luck, because a famous actress, who had starred in the immensely popular film about the sinking of the Titanic, got married at about the same time, in Reading, of all places. The papers reported that the meal at this high-profile celebrity wedding was nothing less than sausage, mashed potato and baked beans. How chic! And a little bit of chic has been exported up here, well, what do you know? Someone must have been in on the famous-person gossip round. The locals suspected Hilary.
Whether the Reading version of the meal had anything approaching the high quality of food preparation and presentation as ours we have no idea, but we trust that the chef there had less of a heart-stop in the kitchen than we did. For, it being a wedding at a busy time of the year, Mark became a little overloaded with work, and we suggested to him that, to ease his load a little, if he gave Audrey the housekeeper his recipe for the baked bean sauce, together with a few tips, she could deal with preparing that more than adequately. So he did.
In our baked bean sauce we always put a little chopped red chilli pepper. Not so much as you can taste it, but it gives the sauce a touch of a zing, livens it up a little. What Mark forgot to tell Audrey was that, before he chops the chillies, he de-seeds them.
The sauce was duly made and it looked fine, and then Mark made another mistake. For some reason, and being in a rush, he tipped the beans into the sauce to marinade, before first liquidising the sauce, so we had beans in among bits of tomato, onion, herbs, and unidentifiable stringy vegetation. Then Mark tasted the sauce, and aspirated, “hhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Hot, this sauce”, he whispered, looking rather worried, “I’m not sure we can get away with serving it to the guests like this.” It was then that we discovered about the omitted instruction concerning de-seeding of chillies.
There was nothing else for it. It was all hands on deck, separating the beans from the multi-textured mixture in which they found themselves. Beans, red sauce, bits of tomato, the kitchen began to look like an operating theatre. Naturally, a guest knocked on the door and asked for a pot of tea at this point but fortunately we were moderately experienced by this stage in our new career and so did not find this unexpected.
Eventually most of the beans were back in a pot and the lumpier bits of the mixture in another pot, and we were ready for liquidisation. We tried diluting the sauce a little, but it was still a fiery experience, whichever way you looked at it. What was to be done?
We decided to go for it, and if the guests found the beans hard to cope with, we would tell them that was how they were supposed to be, how they were served in the finest restaurants, when the finest restaurants served baked beans, we would tell them we knew these things because, well, remember Reading? But no one complained. All the beans were eaten with evident relish, by people who are proud never to have tried a curry or Chinese meal in their lives. People who are forthright steak-and-chips men, with a thump on the desk to prove it.
We had contemplated for a moment changing the menu, describing it as sausage, mash and chilli beans, and how fortunate that we resisted this temptation. Had we done so, no one would have touched them. As it was, they were baked beans. Baked beans are OK, even if they aren’t the same as you get in the shops, you expect some fancy cooking from these posh people. “To be expected, that, s’like anything, you can’t make it like the shops do.” Sometimes, the things that go wrong can have a profound cultural effect on the world, like being pushed off the diving board when you are frightened to jump. The Titanic, and Mark’s errors through overwork, had moved the local people on in their experience of life, just one little bit. If only they knew.
AND THEN CHRISTMAS CAME ROUND AGAIN.
On Christmas Eve there was an explosion, a big flash of blue light in the sky, and all the lights went out. We fumbled around for some torches and looked for the source of the trouble, but before we got to the cause a neighbour telephoned to say she had seen it all. A power cable outside had come down in the wind, right outside our back yard. Sparks had flown, lighting up the entire area, and possibly some sheep in the field might have received a bit of a belt, but all was calm now, the cables were lying strewn across the field, severely divorced from our inlet supply.
We spent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in the gloom of candlelight and a borrowed Calor Gas heater, Mark the chef doing a sterling job producing all the meals including a full Christmas dinner by the flickering light of a bank of candles. Unfortunately the group we were hosting had absolutely nothing of the Boy Scout spirit, the biggest disaster in their view was that most of the telephone lines went out, so that fathers, boyfriends and lovers could not get through, the one line still working being constantly in use for outgoing calls to other fathers, boyfriends and lovers.
The worst bit came early Boxing Day morning, about 1 am, when the fire alarms went off. We had been having trouble with the burglar alarm all afternoon, its ever-flattening backup battery causing it to set itself beeping unpredictably. When at 1am the fire alarm sounded for no evident reason we telephoned the fire alarm company’s emergency number and were advised that probably the same was happening and the only thing we could do was disconnect the alarms. So there we were, with candles burning in all the bedrooms, and no fire alarms. In fact, we later discovered that the battery had not run flat, that one of the group had lit a cigarette close to a smoke detector, and also close to a notice saying No Smoking, though perhaps to be fair he would not have been able to see that very well.
We went to bed planning what we’d have to say in court later. “Well, they make these regulations, then when it comes to a real emergency, the bloody regulations, are they any use?. Where’s that fire officer?” And I would be moved to tell the judge how we had been infuriated by the fire officer earlier in the year who insisted that we spend a lot of money putting a smoke detector in a cupboard under the stairs because something might spontaneously combust under there, that something being one of the four or five chairs we store in it. Actually what happens is that because the cupboard ceiling is so low you keep cracking your head on the smoke detector and so it is probably broken most of the time anyway.
Fortunately for all concerned it did not come to court appearances. The group left on Boxing Day afternoon and about an hour later, the lights came back on.
The woman who organised the event seemed to have a number of boyfriends on high horses to tell her what she should be doing, so in due course she demanded her money back. This meant we needed to apply to the insurance company for loss of earnings as our policy seemed to indicate we could, and the insurance company replied that we were not covered because a) the people had cancelled after the event, in other words our lost money would be reimbursed only if we had not lost any, and, b) the electricity problem had not occurred in the sub-station but on a line leading from the sub-station, thus invalidating the claim as identified in small print item 32c on page 17 of the policy.
It seems that the best way to deal with insurance companies is to use similar techniques to those for dealing with other parties of dubious morality, for example confidence tricksters and fascists; it is to have a contact in the know who can do some sort of nod’s-as-good-as-a-wink-to-a-blind-horse job on them. That is the technique we used; our broker was a specialist in hotel policies and knew the ropes, hinting appropriately about the possibility of unwelcome raised public profile, and the insurance company paid up, though it took until July, the woman getting all her money back including her bar bill. Then she asked for a free holiday too, so we told her, no. And that was that.
The lessons we have learned from the run of practical jokes that are thrown in our way began to be realised soon after we took over our hotel, when we had found that the doorbell will ring whenever you remove your trousers. We also found that this perversity is none too sophisticated, the doorbell will ring if you remove your trousers, even if you remove your trousers in order to induce the doorbell to ring. Unfortunately it is not always a customer who wants to be seen, it may be the builder coming round to see about his as-yet unpaid bill, so it is not a particularly good method of generating custom, though it can help a little when business is quiet.
This was all very well, but the phenomenon tended to generate potentially serious problems when one of us was away, and the other found themselves dealing with an unexpectedly full house. So often did this occur that it was something we came to laugh at in a pathetic way, like one does at childish practical jokes which get done to death. When our children were young, they would sometimes say or do something that made us laugh unexpectedly, thus stimulating them to do it again, and again, and again. We had a proverb which we tried to instil in them, “Once is funny. Twice is silly. Three times, smack your bum”. This became the motto that one day we planned to paint on the sloping slate roof of our hotel, in the way that Scottish hotels would do in the old days, only they told the heavens simply that they were a hotel. We would be more post-modernist cryptic touchy-feely.
Instead, though, we took a pragmatic approach, and said that if the world was going to consistently place obstacles in the way of doing it ourselves, we would do what successful organisations have learned to do over the generations, we would become staffed up so that those particular obstacles could be stepped over. And that is what we did. We began to become professional.
We engaged our chef on a regular basis, even though at the time we did not have enough work to keep him fully occupied and were paying, often, for him to do very little. We hired a reliable housekeeper, and we recruited a personal assistant to ensure that the office was efficiently staffed. It paid off. Business developed such that we seldom any longer paid people for being there, rather than working there.
Having become so much busier, we found we increasingly needed some time off, so we tried to pull back and leave the place in the hands of our entirely capable staff.
This was not an unqualified success. The moment the guests discovered that mummy and daddy had gone out, they gave the babysitter a hard time. If we were here, all was OK. Even if we hid in the office all evening and closed the door so that no-one could see us, everything was fine. But the moment we went out, or rather the guests got wind that we had gone out, it was playing-up time.
The greatest trouble occurred one November when we went on holiday to Morocco, leaving a group, who had never been before and so did not know us, entirely in charge of our staff. We received two letters of complaint, neither really ringing true, complaining about things which our customers normally receive gratefully and happily and write us letters of compliment about. What is going on here?
It may be, of course, that these letters would have arrived anyway. The only other complaints we had ever received in six years of doing this had come from the same place: Ormskirk. Could it be that there is something about Ormskirk? It looks a nice enough town, though they do grow a lot of potatoes in the fields all around. Anyone throw any light on Ormskirk? May be coincidence.
So either it is a research project on the differences between the people of Ormskirk and those of Britain in general, or on what we can do to leave the business in charge of our staff, the same staff who are in charge of the day to day running of the business anyway, without it causing the guests to become truculent, and in either case the prospect seems a challenging, one.
Yet another challenge! Though this one a more intellectual than practical one. We prefer the intellectual challenges. More fun.
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