OUR FRIEND GAETANO ran an Italian bistro not far away. You entered along an alley draped with green, white and red flags past chalkboards scrawled with the day’s menu of linguini and pomodoro, then climbed some steps to a warm smell of garlic and oregano. Gaetano is short and swarthy and speaks English with a strong accent from his native Puglia.
But Gaetano was despondent. A customer had asked for steak and chips. “We don’ do steak an’ chips”, Gaetano told him, “We’re an Italian restaurant. We do pasta”.
“No steak and chips!. Coom on. You must have a bit of meat in the fridge and can fry me up me a few potatoes to go with it. Not too much to ask, is it? That’s what I like: steak and chips. I can’t be doing with all this foreign stuff. Just a bit of meat and some chips will do me fine.”
"I’m sorry".
The man had left the restaurant in noisy disapproval. He was genuinely outraged. A restaurant that doesn’t do steak and chips. It upsets the balance of the world. Both parties spent the rest of the day unhappy. No winner, just two losers. Gaetano was despondent. An unhappy customer is always a disappointment and leaves you feeling down for a while.
Clearly, it is up to those who run a hospitality business to take whatever steps they can to prevent situations like this from occurring.
We learned some lessons from our ducks. We had stocked the pond with ducks in the early days, reckoning that this would be a good, low-cost form of image building. The winter came, and then the spring, and the ducks began to lay some eggs. Local wisdom told us that the chance of these eggs hatching into ducky offspring was tiny. The chicks, if they hatched at all, would soon be eaten by cats, crows or foxes. No chance, they said, unless you take the eggs and hatch them in an incubator.
We'll give it a try anyway. So we made a special construction of wooden poles and chicken wire, which created a cage half in and half out of the water. A duck inside this cage could swim around or walk on the land at its pleasure. But it could not get out of the cage. Then we bought a duck net to catch the chickies together with their mum for the sake of their future safety, and got ready to prove the local wisdom wrong.
When the first eggs hatched we chased around the pond in our wellington boots, collecting up mum and chicks, in order to place them inside the cage. This job sounds straightforward, but much of the pond is too deep to wade in and, small of brain though ducks are in general, they know the value of swimming to the deepest area of water and staying there. It requires persistence and patience to catch a duck, which keeps getting immensely distressed because it is concerned for the safety of its chicks. Eventually, though, we had rounded up our prey and over the spring months we collected in all four mums and twenty eight chicks as part of our kindness.
The experiment was a flop. Only two of the chicks survived to adulthood. Most duck chicks, when they see a piece of chicken wire, decide that the most important thing in life is to try to squeeze through the holes. If they succeed they are thus separated from the safety of their mum. If they fail, they tend to strangle themselves.
Of those chicks which did not end up being eaten or garrotted, most died when the weather got a little cold. We found that, as usual, the experts were misinformed. The cats, crows and foxes could not get inside the cage, but the cold could. Little duck chicks are not strong enough to stand a drop in temperature. They keel over and die.
But at least there were two who had survived. They had been born at the beginning of an exceptionally mild spell and by the time the nights got chilly again they were growing quite sturdy. As they began to gain their flight feathers we let mum out of the cage and left them to develop into proper looking ducklets.
Eventually, the time came to open up the cage and let our carefully nurtured newly feathered charges out into the big wide pond. We lifted the chicken wire from one side of the cage, then stepped back and said, "there".
The first reaction of the ducklings was evident and paramount fear. They flapped about in the water and looked generally in a state of uncontrolled panic, threatening to damage themselves on the remaining wire netting but keeping well away from the opened side of the pen.
Next, came denial. The ducklings swam up and down the still closed side of the pen, looking longingly at the big wide water outside, but avoiding coming anywhere near the other side, which was open. The other ducks swam round to see them, saying, "Hey, it's great out here, we have a much wider world with aubergines and mangoes to eat, as well as the roast lamb and white sliced bread that you get. It's great, we're richer for it."
On the arrival of the team, the young ducks in the area that once was a cage were put in a predicament. They continued swimming up and down the chicken wire, looking forlornly to the outside, "Oh!, if only we could get through this netting, but we can’t, you see."
This state of affairs continued for quite some time. Then one of the ducklings did something that gave it a surprise. It dived to look for food as ducks do from time to time, and came up on the outside of where the side of the enclosure had been. Then in some confusion it swam away, saying to itself, "Well, well, the Lord must have wanted this for me, for I had no responsibility for it".
The remaining duckling then became extremely agitated, swam up and down the still closed side of the pen in a most distressed fashion looking urgently out through the netting, causing its recently escaped brother or sister (we were not sure which) to show signs of grave concern on the other side of the wire.
We left them to it at this point. The remaining caged duckling would get out eventually. Just like people. They accept change eventually, they just have to go through the ritual of being horrified of it and denying it before they do. Next morning the final duckling was on the pond with the rest so presumably had found a way of getting out of the cage area and keeping its dignity somehow.
The mathematician, Douglas Hofstadter, has a theory about what makes the human unique and special in the animal kingdom. He identifies this as the ability that a person has to recognise a loop – a pattern of behaviour that is going round in circles and getting nowhere – and having recognised it, to take steps to break out of it. Hmmm. We thought that too, once upon a time. Then we started dealing with hotel and restaurant guests.
Gaetano’s steak-and-chip demanding customer was clearly an example of a human who proved a flaw in Hofstadter’s argument. He was unable to see that there might be a loop developing in his thought processes and that, to distinguish himself from a beast or fowl, it was his duty to break himself out of it. We soon came to see that this trait, difficulty in coping with the unexpected, or being unwilling to step out of one’s loop, was not so divorced from the human condition as Hofstadter hypothesises. Or perhaps it is, but many people have not yet read the book.
We were a hotel. To keep the loop-trailing customers from having their sensibilities jarred, we should provide something close to what they are expecting. Yet the reputation of the average British hotel at the time was terrible. The expectation was for something not particularly classy. To meet the expectations of those requiring a higher level of quality, we would need to develop a style that was based upon higher cost and a greater range of facilities, moving out of one loop and into another one. At the same time we knew – all our experience and training had told us – that to stick to the established formulas in a world of rapidly changing tastes would be, from the point of view of business strategy, a disaster. To stand any chance of survival we would have to provide a large bulk of our customers with something different from what they thought they wanted, and sell it to them so they came to think that it was their idea in the first place.
OK, no real problem, that is what you often need to do in business. The question was, how to go about it. Clearly one of the key issues lay in chatting up our customers in an appropriate way. We wanted them to feel they had come to the right place, we wanted to please them. And the documentation on the subject of chatting people up told us that the most effective starting point is through listening. If you go on a training course that describes itself as being about people management skills, you may be told that feeding questions to people enables them to open up. To make people feel happy by talking to them, you need to listen to them.
To assist the process, you are often advised to ask ‘open’ questions. This brings all sorts of complexities into the life of a course tutor who then tries to define what an open question is. Some describe it as a question that does not elicit a yes or no answer, the idea being that if the question warrants yes or no it must contain within itself some idea that is constraining the respondent from stating their case as broadly as they wish. Some maintain that a question beginning, ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘where’ or ‘how’ is an open one, a question beginning, ‘do’, ‘have’, ‘could’ or ‘should’ a closed one, which on the face of it amounts to the same thing as the yes-no rule. So, if you ask someone, “do you love me?”, you are inviting a yes or no answer, putting the idea of love in the listener’s head and thus your question is a closed one, whereas if you ask, “what do you feel about me?”, you are leaving the field wide open for the respondent and so your question is open.
That is the theory. But does it work? You may find that either of those questions leads to verbal outpourings or a monosyllable, depending on the current mental state of the person being asked. There can be little distinction between the answers to the questions, “What do you think of the prime minister’s behaviour over the economy?”, and “Do you think the prime minister was wise to follow the course he did on the economy?”. In the first case, you might get the answer, “I don’t think he was wise”, and in the second the answer, “no”. The theory states that one of these is an open question, giving the respondent the opportunity to talk and be listened to, and the other a closed question discouraging this opportunity. Well, sort of, though I’d say the two outcomes are essentially the same. It is, like all the best theory, fun to have around to play mind games with, but to be used with care in one’s everyday transactions.
Professional questioners can be studied any day of the week, by watching television or listening to the radio. Skilful interviewers know how to get people to talk. They challenge them. This often involves a string of ‘closed’ questions, the result of which is a response from the person being interviewed that is difficult to curtail. The important thing is challenge, not to score points – that would be entirely destructive – but to get the interviewee's emotions going. Skilful interviewers will know the level of challenge that is appropriate for the person they are talking to. If they are getting a practised politician to talk, they need to force the line away from diversionary rhetoric, if they are dealing with someone less experienced, they can be noticeably more gentle. Listen to an experienced radio interviewer like John Humphrys, he can spend a whole interview session without asking a question at all, other than the occasional, “isn’t it?”, he simply makes statements that his interviewee disagrees with.
Encourage someone to say something. This opens them up, and they have a wonderful time. There are a number of tricks to help this process along the way. I find that some of the most effective subjects are sex, politics, religion – and silence. The form of questioning is mostly irrelevant. You may not even need a question at all. For example, you could say, “My brother said he read in the paper that the Minister of Education is having an affair with a vicar’s wife . . .”
And then stay silent.
Many people hate silences, and many are a bit doubtful about sex The chances are they will respond with something like, “I didn”t know you had a brother, do you have a big family?”.
Notice that this picks on the safest part of the original statement, thus avoiding the risqué reference. It also opens the person up, they are not simply in the weak position any longer, of being wary about your dangerous ‘open’ questions. So you say, “My family are very close, they fight all the time. At family dinner parties, they always sit me, Uncle Rodney, and Auntie Rita close by each other. Rodney and I argue so furiously it is the only way the family know of keeping Rita quiet for a few minutes.”
Sooner or later, you will find that something hits someone’s own personal interest and they will tell you their life story. This story may be of minimum interest to you, but that is not the point, you are the professional, you are there for them to have a good time by talking to you. I find that the obvious approach of asking someone about themselves often fails, resulting in embarrassment and an excuse to leave the room, but a good dollop of challenge works wonders.
AT SOME POINT, MANY people will get pangs of self-doubt and say, “I must be boring you, I’m sorry”.
We have all met people whose conversation is boring. What an unkind thing to say about someone! What an unkind thing to even think about someone!
I used to find that one of the world’s greatest mistakes was to strike up a conversation with English holidaymakers on French campsites. You would make a polite opening, like,
“Having a good trip?”
And you would get the answer,
“Ay, we left Preston good and early, got a 5 am start so as to miss rush round Wigan, and we made good time on M6, though there were a spot of rain passing Manchester . . .” and so on, a blow-by-blow account of the driving conditions all the way from Lancashire to Toulouse, which taught me not to ask too many open questions.
So I got to thinking, what is it that makes someone’s conversation seem boring and, more tantalisingly, does a person who seems to some to be boring, have a group of friends he meets in a private room somewhere, whose mindsets are so in tune with each other they get really excited and stimulated by each other’s conversation, to the cryptic exclusion of those less attached?
This led me to a theory of tedium, which is that it is quite simply the inability of a person, in certain circumstances, to judge the extent to which their audience is in empathy with them. Someone who follows a line of thought that most other people consider to be too detailed for their needs at that place and moment.
As a hotelier, you sometimes get someone who is afflicted with this fixation on a level of detail peculiar to themselves, and it can be extremely hard and somehow rather selfish to push them off their track. People have been not listening to them all their lives and your job is to help them have a good time.
One such was Mr Gross. Whereas many people who, upon finding their conversation causes their listeners to fidget and look to the door, develop an irritating habit of laughing at their own sentences – what is sometimes called the gallows laugh, where you hang yourself for what you have just said in a subliminal attempt to elicit some kind of sympathy – Mr Gross went one stage further. When he gallows laughed, his ears wiggled.
Mr Gross’ attention to detail was extreme. The chef, Mark, happened to go into the bar for a bottle of something expensive to pour into the desserts, and there was Mr Gross who immediately spotted an audience. Mr Gross raised the subject of his home.
“Do you live in a big house?”, asked Mark, out of natural politeness. He may even had remembered his ‘Welcome Host’ training course, and asked what was theoretically a ‘closed’ question, beginning it with the verb, to do, which the book tells us denotes a closed questioning state, since Mark had a dinner to cook.
Mr Gross, who had already told us that his age was just coming up to sixty-four-and-three-quarters, proceeded to start from the top left corner of his house and give Mark the measurements of every room one by one to the nearest half inch, including adjustments for the widow bays and stairway protrusions.
Poor Mark, it gave him the horrors for the future for, as well as being our chef, he was doing a counselling course. Mr Gross filled him with cold sweats over what he would do if a Mr Gross were to be referred to him as a client for counseeling. It seems that this scenario had not even been mentioned in passing on the counselling course, presumably the people who run counselling courses do not imagine that a Mr Gross exists. Eventually Mark consoled himself with the idea that the Mr Grosses of the world do not go for counselling, primarily because they do not need it. They are happy counting their integers and simple fractions, it is everyone else in the world who has a problem and needs the counselling.
One evening, we were relieved when Mr Gross announced he was going for a walk, as that gave us a rest from numbers and ear wiggling for a while. When he returned, we asked him if he had had a pleasant time, to be told not only where he had parked his car before beginning this walk, but the exact number of steps he had taken on his way back to the car, together with a rationale for not counting his steps on the outward journey from the car, reckoning that, give or take a few, he could be reasonably assured that they would be the same, so that he could pride himself on his efficiency and get the total number by doubling the one he had. Having proudly announced this, he made the grating noises that passed for a laugh and wiggled his ears.
With Mr Gross, it would be both unnecessary and unkind to be challenging. You get his life story, including who said what to who in which office forty years ago, without prompting. It is hard to know whether listening to him makes him feel happier, or whether there is another technique for making him feel good with himself. But presumably he will feel less happy if, as manifestly happens, the moment he opens his mouth someone professes to smell burning and the room clears, so there is some kindness to be given by listening, at least for a few minutes.
Mr Gross liked integers because they gave him some order in his world. He was a bus and train enthusiast, and if you listen to the conversation of bus and train enthusiasts you will often detect strings of integers, just listen to a railway spotter’s conversation with your ears on half attention. Listen to all them numbers. There have been theories put about relating to the peculiarly British phenomenon of railway spotting, which link the activity to the primeval male human search for the rare animal. In the (very) olden days the youth who found the elusive beast was the one to receive the accolades. Now the instinct is redirected towards the iron horse rather than the scruffy wild one. This theory may go some way to explaining why there are so few women train spotters, the people in shabby macs at the end of the platform are nearly always chaps. But the integers, and the order derived from a focus on integers, that too seems to be predominantly male in its manifestation. Why so? We do not know. The encyclopaedia does not seem to tell us this important information.
Neither does the encyclopaedia have any information on why it is that the enthusiasm for following trains seems to be so archetypically British. The obsession with numbers probably has something to do with it, numbers are ordered, numbers, or whole numbers at any rate, are clear, unambiguous, you can hold to to a steady world with them. The same can be said for railway tracks and timetables. In world of chaos, they give order. Other nations have this to a much reduced degree; an ordered Italian would be an oxymoron, and the French tend to be rather too inward-looking. The Swiss, Germans and Dutch live anyway in famously ordered countries, so perhaps they do not need the diversion. In Britain there are those who crave order, mixed with those who thrive on uncertainty – it must be something to do with the British education system. A truly pluralistic society of which we should all be immensely proud; and the only downside is that it presents a lot of daily life-negotiation for the likes of Mr Gross. But that’s a small price to pay, as he definitely seemed happy enough.
THERE IS A VARIANT on the attender to excessive detail, and that is the person whose motivation is not so much trying to make sense of the world in terms of integers rather than real numbers, but who tries to ensure that the unpredictable, rough-edged world out there is really under their control, through a plan to cross every i and dot every t in such a manipulative way that they come over to the rest of us as an infuriating fusspot.
One such was Mr Morris, who, having booked a room for a few days, told us the name, age and bra size of the person he was coming with (no, not really her bra size, just her name and age, but we were expecting the bra-size any minute), what time he was arriving, and at exactly what time he wanted to have breakfast each morning, then called unexpectedly one evening just as we were in the middle of serving dinner to a party of guests, to look around and check the place out. His planned trip was a walking holiday and he had been spending some time checking the route and his accommodation, to make sure there would be no unexpected pitfalls on the day.
Mr Morris was a control freak. By attempting to manipulate the world, he hoped it would be under his control, not because he is a megalomaniac, rather he wants to avoid things happening which he has not predicted and which he thus would be unprepared for. Not driven by a lust for power, rather by a fear of somebody else’s power.
Mr Morris duly arrived for his stay, said he would be down for dinner right away, then fussed around, bringing bags in from his car, going up and down the stairs, disappearing, reappearing without his girlfriend, disappearing again, until suddenly to our surprise about an hour later, there they were sitting in the dining room.
“Could I ask a favour”, was the first thing Mr Morris said to me.
“Depends what it is”.
“It’s not to big a favour”.
“Still depends what it is”.
“I don’t think you’ll find it too much trouble”.
“Go on.”
“Would you have any room in your freezer to store our picnic ice packs?”
“Sure, now what would you like to drink with dinner?”.
“It’s just that we like to keep or picnic cool, you see, and we have to take a packed lunch with us every day, because we’re walking a planned route, to a tight schedule, and we aren’t able to make detours to get to the nearest pub or café, you see. So that’s why I asked. I hope you don’t mind me asking.”
And so it was with just about every subject imaginable, right down to the number of mushrooms for breakfast, though Mr Morris made an uncharacteristically imprecise request on the first day and asked for just a few.
“This is too many mushrooms”, he said when his breakfast was presented to him, “I can’t eat all these!”
“Please feel free to leave any you cannot eat on the side of your plate.”
On following mornings, Mr Morris was careful to stipulate two mushrooms, exactly. He had made a slip there, with that word, few.
To add to the infuriation, Mr Morris never did give us his ice packs, nor did he once arrive for breakfast at the time he had arranged to. He engaged in other demanding behaviour too, such as insisting upon taking his used breakfast crockery and placing it on the table where other guests were helping themselves to cereals and fruit, and, most annoying of all, breaking a glass protective cover to a sideboard in his bedroom then placing cups of hot tea on the now exposed polished surface. Just breaking the glass must have been no mean feat, presumably he had been fiddling about with it and dropped it as it is difficult to break any other way. He also managed to wrench a window catch from its mountings, presumably by being convinced that the window was jammed, when in fact the catch was on, and forcing it so that his original theory of jamming could be sustained. This was all accompanied by a stream of narrative, very complimentary to us, but designed to tell us what a clever chap he was. How he had chosen the best place to stay of any of the people walking with him, many of whom had chosen the cheap B&Bs, and how, in the long run, because of all manner of factors, he would end up paying less than them for more convenience.
Mr Morris wanted to be in control of the world. He hated uncertainty, but more than that, he tried to organise situations such that everyone knew he was in control. Nobody cares or even notices, of course, or if they do they just think, why has that stupid idiot put his dirty plates on the serving table?. So what does one do with Mr Morris, to make him have an enjoyable time without both going crazy yourself or driving away all the other guests? The first of these is the most difficult problem, for in general the other guests see straight through the Mr Morrises of the world and steer a polite distant course. What you probably have to do is not play the game. We said nothing about the dirty cups, the broken glass, the wrenched window catch, or the teacup stains. Had we done so, it would have generated so many explanations about how it was the fault of the recalcitrant inanimate objects with which he is surrounded and we then could probably do little but agree, taking him as our model. We are there to give him a good holiday, not to psychoanalyse him for his future wellbeing.
Over the years we have become used to dealing with control freaks and they are some of the hardest people to get a smile out of. This is perhaps not surprising, since much of what is considered humorous in the world revolves around the unexpected. A white horse walks into a pub and asks for a glass of whisky. The landlord says, “We have just the thing for you, a whisky named after yourself”, to which the horse replies, “You don’t mean . . . you have a whisky called Eric?”. It is the unexpected, that makes it a joke. But if the unexpected is for you a proposition filled with the greatest imaginable horror, how can there be anything to laugh about?
We have found that in our part of the world there is one thing the control freaks cannot control – and it always seems to get them back – the weather. The most striking example we had of this was a wedding one September, where the bride-to-be had gone to enormous lengths to ensure that everything was just as she planned it to be, she would have peeled the carrots for the chef had we permitted it. On her way to the registry office the rain started to come down, so bad it flooded almost everywhere around, our neighbour Brian had to go and rescue his chickens whose feeding bowls were floating around like boats. On the wedding car the ribbons crept up the bonnet and wrapped themselves around the windscreen wipers which therefore stopped working, making the whole trip more likely to end up being registered for a funeral than a wedding. Had our control-freak bride been prepared to let it all hang out, as it were, the sun would have shone. Peculiar, but true.
We never paid the largish amount of money to get a wedding licence so people could not get married at our house, they could only hold the reception here. We sometimes contemplated applying for the wedding licence, but it would have put our prices up for weddings if we did that, to try and cover the outlay. Weddings are hard work, on one hand the group is not a coherent one, it is diverse in tastes and half the people do not really want to be there. Against this handicap the bride and her mother are absolutely desperate that everything should go smoothly and without the slightest possibility of a hitch.
Actually, when we did it everything did go smoothly, or has done for all the weddings we have hosted. But only after we have listened to mother’s concerns that grandma lives solely on beetroot sandwiches and will become difficult if presented with anything else and that teenage nephew will agree to eat nothing but baked bean and pineapple pizza and we have had to keep repeating, “Trust us, we’ve done this before. We are the professionals. Don’t you try to do it.” But a wedding is a stressful time for a mother.
VARIATIONS ON THE PATHOLOGICAL controllers include the one who interjects with their view and never pauses for breath, and the one who, at some point early on in the proceedings says, “I don’t want to be difficult, but . . .”. In the first case the unexpected is not given a chance to get a look in, in the second it is about to be resisted.
“I don’t want to be difficult, but . . .” usually means that what is about to be complained about has been introduced into society over the past decade, and our recalcitrant contrary does not like the development. Such people often pride themselves on being upright members of the citizenry, and if so it can be useful to suggest that, since what is on offer is commensurate with your style, it is the one you have adopted, you are showing that the type of uniformity that characterised the old Soviet Union is not fashionable in this country, and how thankful we should be for that. That can usually be assured of getting them to go elsewhere.
The occasion when I used this approach to its full level was with Mr and Mrs Dobson. Their complaints began when they did not like the view from their room. They wanted a view down the valley, not one over the hills. So could they change to a different one. No, they couldn’t, all the others were occupied.
Then they did not like the dinner menu, they were expecting something “nice’. I asked them to give me an example of what they considered nice and they replied, “you know, something, well – nice”.
They were unhappy with the choice of dishes on the menu. There was nothing they could eat. Not enough Choice. They were particularly upset that some of the items were vegetarian. “My husband”, said Mrs Dobson, “considers a vegetarian option to be no Choice whatsoever!”.
Mrs Dobson’s husband was quite capable of speaking for himself, he then started looking snootily looking at the wine list. As I handed it to him, I explained we were rather proud of it as we tried to present wines which were a little out of the ordinary and which one did not find everywhere.
“But I’ve never heard of any of these!”, he exclaimed haughtily, throwing the book onto the table like rejected homework.
“No, you may not have”, I replied, “since we try to provide wines that are not commonplace, so our customers can try something they do not see every day in the supermarket, I am perhaps flattered if you have not come across any of them before.”
“But how do I know if they are any good?”
“They are all good. Try one, and if you don't like it, I’ll drink it.”
Eventually Mr and Mrs Dobson agreed that they might have heard of Australian Chardonnay, of which there was one on the list. Mr Dobson drank a bottle of that and truculently said he would eat nothing for dinner.
The Dobsons were even into being rude to the waiter, telling him that there were training courses you could go on, you know. Eventually, I had to sit down with Mr Dobson and say that our style was an informal one, with an image verging on the homely, and we well knew what we were doing. That was one of our selling points. I was sure that he, clearly a man of some business experience, would know that a strong and clear image was essential in today’s world and that our approach was paying dividends along classical business lines and the that principle would, I was sure, be approved of by any member of the government urging an upturn in the economy. That he did not like it I was sorry about, but really that was not our fault, it was the fault of a mismatch of expectations caused primarily by the inadequate forms of classification of style inherent in the hotels guide book he had found us from. It would do us both a great favour if he were to point this out to them as I had indeed been attempting to do for some time.
“Thank you”, said Mr Dobson, “If it is not too upsetting for you we should like to leave and go elsewhere in the morning”.
“Not upsetting at all.” It sure wasn’t.
The Dobsons were not really professional complainers. They just had a feeling that there is a creeping wickedness in the world which they as good, green wellie wearing, upright folks who drive a large Rover with leather seats and get their wine advice from the television and supermarket promotions, have a duty to resist, but there are the more mercenary sorts who think it is clever to negotiate lower prices and if possible get their money back.
The second sort are often detectable as soon as they call. Either they, or their secretary, will ask the price, and if you answer, say, £50, will immediately say that is a little more than they were thinking of and their budget will only run to £45. In some cases the secretary has been told that she must say this, and you can usually detect this in her voice. In such cases, by standing firm the chances are she will call again with the same question, having been told she must try once more, and if she does this you can be pretty sure the booking will come through at the originally quoted price eventually, the only loser in the transaction being the secretary who gets the reputation from her boss of being incompetent.
Those people who come to the door and try the discounting game can be told to go elsewhere, which they usually do with bad grace, their attitude being that you are stupid, if you have empty rooms, to turn down a taker for the room, it is late in the evening and you are clearly not going to get a rush of people at this time of day, and one pound is better than no pounds. Our attitude is that to accept the people at a discounted rate would be unfair on the other guests. If anything we should be giving financial advantages to those who have booked well in advance. If, like some airlines, we were to make it known that latecomers who take pot luck get a knock down price to fill the empty seats, or in our case beds, then that would be fair. We would have to make it clear what constituted late arrival – what time of the day for example – so that everyone perceived the system to be fair.
Many hotels have been rather stupid over their discounting policy, quoting inflated prices and hoping that as many people as possible will pay them, whilst having a kind of reserve minimum that they are prepared to drop to for those people who wish to, or feel they have to, play the bargaining game. This is antediluvian, with about as much thought for the future of the business as you would expect from a dinosaur.
Gradually, we began to get our image clearer. We were to be informal. We were to be no-frillies. We would try to make our guests feel good about themselves. We were to feed people on dinner party style food of the times. We also had to consider our approach to those issues that are guaranteed to raise a contentious hackle: smoking, dogs, and children.
Unless you happen to be in a society where nearly everyone smokes, smoking is an antisocial activity. As it is, in what are described as first world countries, i.e. the affluent ones, smokers are in a minority. It can take days for the smell of cigarette smoking in a bedroom to disperse, depending on the number of cigarettes smoked – the more polluted the atmosphere the longer it takes to cleanse. This means that a single smoker can have a seriously adverse affect on your business. The next person using the room can be discouraged from coming again or staying for longer because they remember the unpleasant stale smell in their room. The smoker can cost you more money than the size of their bill.
If you are a smoking hotel, then non-smokers can choose go elsewhere. If you are a non-smoking hotel, smokers can choose to go elsewhere. This is freedom. If everyone is allowed to do what they want anywhere they want, the smokers will upset the non-smokers and the non-smokers, by looking disapproving, will tend to make the smokers feel uncomfortable, nobody will be happy, and both types are likely to think, “I’m not going there again”. You lose.
The idea of smoking or non-smoking establishments had not much caught on when we took over our hotel, many places seemed to think that by saying nothing at all and by welcoming everyone equally they would double their customer base. They were wrong. Right up to the time in 2007 when smoking was banned in public places in England and Wales (Scotland having begun earlier)it could still seem a bit restrictive to put up a no smoking sign, people could begin to wonder what other rules they will be expected to abide by in this place. No snoring? No using the lavatory after 11 pm? But as more places became clear about their style, most peoples’ concerns began to diminish greatly, the issue becoming one of clear definition of the product and less one of rules and regulations.
In reality, we often found that a group would consist of, say, just one smoker. For this reason we set aside one room as a smoking room, and we found that this was generally welcomed by both non-smokers and smokers, as the smokers feel they are not upsetting anyone who is too polite to complain. It did mean that we probably detered people who cannot stand the smell of smoking anywhere in the house at all, and as this proportion of our potential market increased we switched to being a completely non-smoking house. For us it was a matter of commercial sense.
When we made our dining room non-smoking, the self-appointed experts said that it would chase half our customers away, but it seemed to do the opposite, the half that were deterred from coming were more than compensated for by the number of replaced them. The customers became more complimentary and it certainly stayed cleaner. The room we designated as the smoking room was grey where the white should be, gradually getting darker towards the ceiling.
We found that there are certain groups of people more likely to be smokers. Our experience showed an empirically determined statistic that smoking sections of the population include the following classifications: poor people, nurses (though this seems to be changing a bit), social workers, gay men and lesbian women, young women and to a lesser extent young men, and business people who have a computer and a visiting card, but not much evident in the way of a job.
What is the link between this motley collection of person types? It seems that people in Western developed societies are likely to smoke if, for one reason or another, they do not feel confident about themselves. Not everyone who can be classified into these groups smokes, and not everyone outside of them doesn’t, but it is a feature, very noticeable, and in a way quite understandable.
If you are a non-smoking hotel, then do you become classist? Poor people smoke. Unsuccessful people smoke. Working class people smoke. Are you prepared to exclude the lumpen proletariat from your preferred customer profile in this way? Does this fit in with your image of being an open hostelry? Is being a non-smoking hotel a morally justifiable and politically correct thing to do? Can you uphold a moral stance about society – could you show your face in the church for example – if you effectively exclude the poorer and disadvantaged sections of society in such a blatant fashion?
We can, because in addition to being non-religious I, in particular, share some sympathy with Stalin’s view of the peasantry, that they are a drain on the forward movement of society and should be turned into middle class thinkers by whatever means practical – though I do not go to the Stalinistic extremes of killing them because that only turns someone into a corpse, and not even a middle class corpse at that. I have had a glass of beer thrown over my head by right-on thinkers for expressing this view of a socialist ideal, but I believe it to be true nonetheless. Obviously the issue must be one for every hotelier’s conscience book.
Smoking is, however, an especially difficult issue for us because as well as priding ourselves on being non-snooty, one of our key markets is health authorities and local authorities, which tend to contain a larger than average proportion of nurses, social workers, gay men and lesbians.
We observe that low self-esteem and peer group pressure mark out the types of people who smoke, though there is a myth about a highly stressed life needing public manifestation to prove it. Nurses, social workers and gay men and women like to tell everyone how stressful their existence is. No doubt it is, but they are not the only groups with this aspect to their lives and many of the most extreme furrowed brows and harassed countenances do not need to bother with the cigarettes.
DOGS ARE IN MANY WAYS a similar issue to smokers. They smell. Smokers smell of stale cigarette ash, and dogs smell of dog. We had a no-dogs rule and people would frequently and typically telephone and insist that their dog is different, it is $lsquo;well behaved’. What is a well-behaved dog? Is it as opposed to a badly behaved dog which cocks its leg against the kitchen door, bites elderly ladies when they try to help themselves to their muesli, and tries to give the waiter a kiss every time it sees him carrying more than two dishes at once?
Our problem with dogs is not their behaviour, it is that they are hairy and they smell of dog. It therefore costs more to clean the room after they have been sleeping there. Every dog owner insists that their dog’s hairs are glued firmly in and that their dog has no smell, but every next customer who uses the room disagrees with them. A hotel or guesthouse that specialises in dogs can say to such follow-on customers, “Well, what do you expect from a hotel that encourages dogs?”, one that says nothing and allows everything will have more customers who feel that their personal comfort is being compromised. As usual it is a matter of being clear about your market.
Dogs can, too, cause their owners to behave in an unpleasantly untrustworthy way. Our friend Adrian ran a busy pub nearby and tells the tale of having spent thousands of pounds on a new carpet in the bar area. The first day it was laid a woman came up to the counter, ordered a drink and a bag of crisps, sipped the drink then opened the pack or crisps and tipped the contents onto the shiny new carpet for her dog to slobber over. Adrian asked her whether it was her custom to do that sort of thing that at home. She looked at him as if it he was a most difficult and obstreperous servant.
Dogs will often cause their highly respectable-sounding owners, to lie.
“It says in the guide book that you take dogs.”
“I’m afraid we do not. May I ask which guide book are you looking at?”
“The Tourist Board’s. This year’s. And it shows here quite clearly under your entry that dogs are accepted. And, really, I think that you should not go back on that. If it states something so firmly in the guide book I would expect you to honour that commitment. After all, I cannot be expected to know about your sudden changes of mind. I have to believe what you advertisement says. That’s reasonable by anyone’s standards, surely!”.
It took a few instances of this and some careful research before we realised that the guide book indicated nothing of the sort. The poor old innocent dog was causing its owner to defend it to a point that even the dog would have disapproved of. Dogs are hairy (and bald dogs probably rather sweaty), and dogs smell of dog. Perfectly OK, after all, a dog is a dog, what would you expect it to smell of? What is so odd is the way in which this statement causes so much dispute among those who own a dog – not all, of course, some dog owners do not expect their pooch to share their bed and their dinner and no doubt a glass of wine and a discussion on the state of the royal family, but many seem to and it is hard to know which is going to be which from the initial telephone call.
Hilary and I were out seeing what the area had by way of competition one day. We believe it is good to do that as often as we can to see whether there are people out there doing it better than us, with some ideas we could copy. Driving along the West Cumbrian coast road we saw a charming rustic old flour mill with a sign, ‘Morning Coffee and Lunches’. A smart enough sign, we’ll see how they do the coffee. We walked into the café and there was nobody about, but a dog came in from the muddy yard and began to paw at our clothes. Attempts to tell it to go away did no good so I picked it up and held it away from me at arms length, its feet now pointing in a direction that made touching our clothes impossible. At this point the owner of the café came in.
“Would you put her down, please, she doesn’t like being picked up.”
So I did, and the dog began to jump up at us again. So I picked her up again.
“Look, I have just asked you to put her down. She does not like being picked up. Please!”
“Will you make sure your dog doesn’t place its muddy footprints on us then”, and I put the dog down again.
“Molly”, shouted the man, “Outside”. Of which command the dog took no notice at all and began to jump at our trousers once more.
“Molly!”. Louder. “Out. Side!”, and again the dog made a bee-line for us, so I picked her up yet again.
“I don’t want to tell you again, she does not like being picked up. Put her down. Please!”
“Have your dog”, I said and thrust the dog into his chest, and we left in a state of some anger and distress, the dog following us up the drive in the hope of continuing the fun.
In the car driving away I was still angry and morose. Hilary told me to forget it, it was not important, we were not desperate for the coffee, which would probably have been weak anyway. But I could not forget it. Does this area want to join the same century as the rest of the country, or does it want to remain a pathetic, comical, backwater? At least we preferred not to put the needs of our customers before the needs of our dog, I suppose. Dogs can do that, they can turn a man into a beast.
LIKE SMOKING AND DOGS, children can be viewed as a commercial disadvantage, and some guesthouse owners put a limit on the age of children they will accept. Perhaps the nightmare scenario is that a youth, oozing pus from raw red pimples, will, while breakfasting on baked beans and tomato ketchup, sneeze into his hand, have a look at the outcome, grimace and wipe his palm on his trousers, then spend the next hour and a half brushing past every clean tablecloth in the dining room. Alternatively, he might finish his plate of baked beans and tomato ketchup by wiping it clean with his finger, then go and sort through your brochures.
The problem is where do you set the age limit. Thirty five?
One difficulty we find with children younger than thirty five is either that they have been on an assertiveness course, or that their mother has been on part one of the assertiveness course, which tells her to ask for things, but has not yet graduated to part two, which tells her only to ask for things she actually wants. Mother has been to a few lessons and been encouraged to ask for things in a big way, and there is naturally a great temptation for her to ask not only on behalf of herself, but also for her children, when her children are in fact indifferent about whether they get the requested item or not, and as a protest they wipe what they receive as a result of this request, on the curtains.
Assertiveness-training has been a fashionable pastime for certain sorts of people since the early 1980s. A society had been allowed to develop in Britain in which it was thought inappropriate or impolite to state clearly what you wanted or what you thought. Put up with it stoically, was the supposed correct British way, anything else was made to seem weak, pathetic and foreign. Of course the people in the upper strata of society were never shy to state their demands, it was the people aspiring to these social levels for whom the reticent attitude was thought to be proper. A kind of implicit class divide designed to keep the meek, meek. Naturally enough, as people become better off and closer to the middle of the heap, there was a backlash, and assertiveness became the thing.
The assertiveness training some the children receive, presumably at school, can be taken on board most diligently, very firmly and in a bogus mid-Atlantic accent:
“I do not eat vegetables, I do not eat fruit. I eat hamburgers, I eat chips, and I drink Coke. Period!”
It may be that mother has not got to a similar degree of education herself and she finds this repeated and unwavering statement of needs hard to counter, though those mothers who, in response to this, make twisting motions with their hands around such a child’s neck – which is what I do and it seems to have at least a temporary moderating effect – probably have the best chance of a comfortable future.
Food and mothers can be an unfortunate combination. This could be a sound reason for a hotel or guest house setting a minimum age limit, though we have never done this. Children do not smell too bad, and if they are a problem, it is usually an internal family problem, not ours directly.
For example it is quite common to come across teenage girls who appear to eat nothing at all. Their parents become tense at the dinner table, wanting their daughter to be like everyone else, wanting to be able to hold a conversation about the state of the world, or to make amusing comments and laugh communally, but are too taut with the issue that their daughter will not eat. They have already told us that the daughter is fussy about food and would it be possible to do her just a piece of plain roast chicken, which they know she will accept. But which of course she does not touch. The daughter is in control, she has consumed her parents’ every thinking moment with concentration on her, even though they try weakly to discuss the weather, the news, the meal they are eating, all of these things croak out pathetically because they cannot get their minds off the daughter, who sits there with a glum look, pushing the plate away disdainfully.
What we know, but the parents do not see, is the waste paper bin in the daughter’s room next morning – full of the discarded wrappers from packets of sweets, biscuits, snacks and crisps. We do not tell of course, that would be of no value, and the daughter may become a customer of ours one day.
Though on the way, we shall still shake our heads with tearful disbelief in the kitchen, as the anorexic girl, as she gets older, finds herself unable to eat what everybody else eats, and brings into the dining room for breakfast her own bag of yoghurt, melon, bottled mineral water and strawberries, and her own sterilised mini-food mixer, and asks for a jug to pour the liquidised concoction into, for that is all she can consume for breakfast. Anything else will make her ill, you see.
But these things are not directly detrimental to us. We can help a bit by assuring the parents that we are not looking down our noses, that we understand and sympathise, but why should we want to ban children? There is one good reason: they cost us more. There is a real problem with children in a hotel. It is that the parents expect to pay half the price, when the cost to you is double. The parents say, “My child only eats tiny portions of the plainest food, and is in bed by seven o'clock. Why should we have to pay full price when the costs are so small?“
This is wrong. The costs of a meal go up, when the chef has to do something special, and especially at a time when he is normally doing something else. When costing food eaten out, staff costs greatly exceed the cost of ingredients, made worse when the number of dishes served is small. If there is cleaning and laundry in the equation, then the costs go up even more. So perhaps that is a reason for saying, ‘no children’, though we never took this line, we just had to load the cost to the adults in a kind of socialist wealth re-distributive fashion. The nursery tea is one of our most expensive services.
Children can also be detrimental to the business when there is a group of people socialising together, some of whom have children and some of whom do not. Half the parenting part of the group put their children to bed before dinner and the other half fail to, and the children who are still up wander or rampage about, causing constant disruption to the dinner party and making for a tense atmosphere. Then the guests do not enjoy themselves as much as they might and do not feel inclined to repeat the experience. We are the losers. It can be excruciating to watch, and perhaps they would not have booked in anyway, had the children been prohibited.
Sometimes, it is just one little boy. He will not go to sleep. He wanders downstairs in his pyjamas again and again, until one of the parents sits him on their lap while they try to eat their dinner. The little boy gets more and more tired. Red rings begin to form around his eyes. He cannot sit on his parent’s lap for long. He fidgets. He wants to wander around. He must constantly be watched as in his tiredness he begins bumping into things and getting under the feet of the waiter. From time to time he bashes his head against the corner of a table and yells loudly and pathetically. And all the time the adults are trying to enjoy a dinner party. The little boy is un-coordinated with tiredness, but still he will not go to sleep. The dinner party is spoiled.
Many times we hear the enthusiastically-put prediction that the children will be fed at 6 pm, then they will be settled down with some games by 7.30, when the adults will enjoy a relaxed dinner party with good wine and conversation. It is not right for us to say, “Not a hope, mate”, because that would be a slight to somebody’s children and that would not be a sound business attitude, as criticising someone’s is almost a disatrous a marketing technique as criticising someone’s mother, but we know that their hope has about as much chance of success as their levitating home afterwards, which is what many of them will wish they could do, before the evening is through.
In the old days, it was less of a problem. If you were wealthy, you paid someone else to look after the children during a dinner party. If you were poor, you most probably never had dinner parties in the first place. Now, people are bunched together more in the middle. A dinner party with friends is a necessary part of the social round. The children should be there, too, because, well, my children should not be treated as some sort of freaks, shut in the cupboard until someone deigns to let them out to play with them or teach them something, they should be treated as human beings, after all they are human beings, you know!
And then the dinner party ends up in chaos.
There is a mis-match here between what is provided and what is really required. People are more bunched together in the middle of society than they once were, and this trend looks set to continue. Some will take the old aristocratic route and find someone else to look after their children before they dress for dinner, but for a large and growing number, the answer will not be to try and fit the people to the circumstances, but to fit the circumstances to the people. Why should a dinner party consist of a grand array of items which, if touched by the unpractised hand, will break, spill, end up on the floor, set the place on fire, or cause blood to be shed? Informality is the style of the future. Informality is a leveller.
All we have to do is convince the customers that this is the way. For informality of style also means informality of food, and informality of food has tended to mean rather unsophisticated food. We remember arriving at Glasgow Central railway station in the early 1990’s with our two young-teenage sons and being refused entry to the station cafés because they were in effect pubs, and so banned to children, the only place we were allowed something to eat was a hamburger bar. That is what the children eat. Hamburgers.
This is changing. Food in Britain is increasingly becoming something you like to eat rather than something you like to squawk over. Out with all the slippery crisp tablecloths, the splintery spindly glasses, the sitting down on cue to a timetable of starter, mains and delicately balanced dessert. In with the earthy, flavoursome, eclectic range of varied and easy-to-eat dishes, which a person can take their time over, at their own favoured pace. The new menu looks a lot different from what many people expect and are used to. And then the children can be part of the scene.
At the moment, though, we cannot do this for many of our customer groups. Whenever we have tried it we have found too strong a tendency for the people to take the ham and the chicken legs and to leave all else behind, and if there is no ham or chicken leg, or anything their own mother fed them when they were a lass or lad, to eat nothing at all and be hungry. It too often becomes a case of Sushi meets Silloth, (Silloth is a town on the Solway Firth, west of Carlisle, it has the reputation of being cold, damp and windy and generally about two decades behind the rest of the country. When Sushi comes to Silloth, the north south divide will have begun to be bridged).
In the meantime, the best opportunity we get of demonstrating how the future will look is with that cost-inefficient expense, the nursery tea. By providing a range of simple and high quality foods, from which the children can select what they want, and by presenting it attractively – the standard never-fail trick is to ring the edge of the plate with regularly spaced half-grapes – the children eat it with gusto. Their parents are delighted and sometimes amazed and, quite often, find themselves tucking in too. The future is in the children.
Which leaves just one problem to be resolved, before we can be absolutely sure that children are a good thing to accommodate and are not to be consigned to the reject pile along with the dusty smokers and the greasy dogs. It has to do with going to the lavatory. We are reminded every time we have a large contingent of children in, if we did not know already, that a large contingent of children is present, because the drains begin to overflow. They get blocked by the vast quantity of toilet paper that they suddenly have to carry away and find themselves unable to. Why do young children use so much loo paper? I have looked in the encyclopaedia, but I cannot find an answer to this either. The books of knowledge never tell you what you really need to know.
Smoking, children and dogs. A perennial problem for businesses that deal with the public, but there is another one on the horizon, something else to cause offence and have allergies to, to set up societies against and try to ban in public. Perfume.
Perfume smells, often more strongly than cigarettes or dogs, certainly more so than children, though mercifully not so socially unacceptably so as any of the three – yet. But it can still take a long time to clear the smell from a bedroom.
THE WORST EVER PROBLEM we had from a lingering perfume smell followed behind Mrs Sadler, who was so immensely overweight she could not wash properly. Getting into a bath would have been out of the question and there was equally no way in which she would all have fitted into one of our standard shower cubicles. So she splashed smelly substances over herself in what was, of necessity, vast quantities. It took a few weeks before Mrs Sadler’s memory was entirely dispersed from the bedroom.
There was a tragic part to the story of Mrs Sadler which showed itself of the first morning she was with us when her husband was found to have left his heart tablets at home. Mrs Sadler’s husband had, we learned, a history of heart trouble, and if he did not have his tablets every day before noon, serious consequences might obtain. Mr Sadler himself did not seem too bothered by this but Mrs Sadler was beside herself, pacing up and down, crying, holding a cigarette in her shaking and trembling hands, emptying out the car, going back to the bedroom, upturning the suitcases, shouting at her husband for what a fool he was, it seemed it might be she who would have been better prescribed the tablets.
Eventually, Hilary suggested to Mrs Sadler that she have some breakfast. Just have a little time over breakfast, maybe with a few moments calm reflection the whereabouts of the tablets might come to mind. But, no, I could not possibly eat anything, I feel so sick. Why did that stupid fool not bring his tablets? Oh. I’m so worried. Ill with worry. Ill. Boo, hoo, hoo, hoo hoo.
With patient persistence, Hilary eventually got Mrs Sadler to sit down at the breakfast table, with the repeated insistence that a little breakfast might help to put things in perspective. Mrs Sadler perched on the edge of the chair with a temporary air, and without a moment’s consideration ordered the full works of sausage, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomato, toast butter, tea. And the moment she put the first forkful into her mouth a dramatic change came over her. She visibly fludged. No longer a shaking, crying, agitated, nervous wreck of a women, but calm, contented, rational and at peace with the world. The key to helping someone with a difficult situation, is when you find their strategy for dealing with it, and Hilary had helped Mrs Sadler find hers.
Hilary had spent years as a professional in the area of helping people cope in difficult and stressful situations and in helping them manage their lives for effective outcomes and, after all those years of academic tomes and of serious learned discussions late into the night, she had at last found the answer. It had turned out to be – a sausage.
AND THEN ANOTHER CHRISTMAS CAME. We had no bookings for it, so as a late gesture we placed an advertisement in a national newspaper. “Still desperate about Christmas? Phone us now.” And we got a booking from a family who were, as the ad invited them to be, desperate about Christmas. Mother was dying of cancer and there was a feeling that it would make a kindly final treat for her to get the family together. The problem was that all the brothers and sisters who were her children, though individually quite delightful, could not bear to be near each other. When one walked into a room the other who was already there would, if they could, walk into another one. But they all sat down to dinner together, silently but dutifully, for the benefit of mum, who appreciated it greatly.
We could not help thinking that, from a religious point of view, it might have been better if Christmas had been discouraged by the Church, then this family could have had a final dinner with their mum without having to make such an excruciating few days of it, with such expectations flying about that were never going to be fulfilled all that satisfactorily, and thus would the Church have been instrumental in performing a laudable pastoral duty.
OUR LEARNING CURVE was beginning to level off a bit. We had begun to reach a market that might make a bit of noise in the dining room and so liven the place up a little. We had begun to insist upon an environment that was pure and clean and minimised the number of holes in the bedsheets. Most importantly, by being much clearer about what was on offer and by attempting to be not too concerned about failing to please those customers who we did not care to have come back again – though this is always hard at the time and always leaves a poor atmosphere in the kitchen – we had begun to dramatically increase our volume of guests. Mr Gross would have been excited, had we been foolish enough to tell him, that we were actually making bigger integers.
We still had occasional difficulties, of which the most certain was going to be Christmas, but we were obviously going to have to put up with that, if the Church was not showing itself bold enough to tackle the problems of society, there was little that we could do to help but try to give an annual unknown family a little chance of making the dreaded time pass just a little faster.
Anyway, mum had hung on for the Christmas get-together, she died on January 7th and we received an exceedingly kind letter from Dad, thanking us for helping her to have a least a few moments of family togetherness before she could have them no more, and we felt sad, but proud, and ready to face the new year with a hope of better things to come, and we put all thoughts of Christmas away as it was still, in our list of things to worry about for now, a long way off.
We’ll survive another one, won’t we? Could be a challenge!
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