IN SKIPTON, NORTH YORKSHIRE, IN THE 1960s there was a Chinese restaurant called Yi Din Haw, one of the first Chinese restaurants to move into the area, the locals used to say that it was called Yi Din Haw for the obvious reason that it was where you went for yi dinhaw. Well, it probably was. One evening three ruddy-faced young men in tweedy suits and skin abrasions where they had recently shaved came in, sat down and began looking at the menu.
Menus in Chinese restaurants at the time tended to be long. Based upon the assumption that the British respond positively to ‘choice’, there would be six or seven basic ingredients that would be listed in many combinations. Six to the power of six is forty-six thousand six-hundred and fifty-six so it is not too difficult by mixing and matching the combinations to make people feel that they have a large menu to choose from and therefore lots of personal freedom in their decision-making. But just in case their customers were uncertain about the unaccustomed style of cooking, the Chinese restaurants would list three of four dishes at the end that they assumed had a British feel to them. These additional dishes were usually chicken and chips, omelette and chips and perhaps steak and chips for a few pounds extra.
Our three ruddy-faced lads spent ages looking at the menu, saying not a word to each other. The waiter came a few times to see if they had made a decision, but no, not yet, they looked rather sheepishly at the waiter intimating that they were choosing hard, the decision was soon to be reached and it needed careful deliberation to ensure they made the wisest choice. Eventually, among the forty-thousand-odd dishes on offer they found what they were looking for and the next time the waiter came to their table they were ready. “Chicken and chips, please”, said one, “Chicken and chips, please”, said the second, “Chicken and chips, please”, said the third.
The waiter took the order to the kitchen. All was calm and passive for a while and then, quite suddenly, there was a noise. The chef, it seemed, had gone berserk. Pots and pans were thrown around, insults were shouted in Cantonese, great hollering and screaming and suggestions of blood on the walls. At length everything went quiet and in due course the three young men got their chicken and chips, for which they had been waiting all wide-eyed and innocent, with still scarcely a word exchanged between them. Not being too strong on Cantonese, I cannot be sure, but it seemed to me that the three men’s chicken and chips were the last straw that broke the chef’s temper. There he is with a kitchen full of beautifully prepared Oriental masterpieces, and all these stupid Brits want to eat is bloody chicken and chips. If he had to cook up one more greasy tasteless sodding chicken and chips this evening he was going to flip his top. And he had.
A business professional with a mobile phone and a pressed lounge suit might conclude that the restaurant had not been clear enough about its focus. It had defined its product too vaguely. To concentrate on Chinese masterpieces may be slower to get established, but at least it would not create a restaurant where people are reluctant to go because they may find themselves going home with a cleaver protruding from their hat. Product focus is important. We knew that from the textbooks before we took over our hotel and all we had to do was put the theory into practice.
The first thing to do, now that our chimney was firmly implanted on the roof and the pond had some water and colourful ducks, was to begin by thinking, what are we doing here? What did we want from all this? What did our customers want and what was their perception of us? What did our neighbours think of us and how could we manipulate their views to our advantage? In many ways this was trickier for us than it would have been for Mr Yi. At least he knew, or should have done, what a Chinese restaurant was, we were not even quite sure what we were, before we could even get to being an authentic one. The theories of management and marketing we had been raised on told us to think about it though, so we did.
We knew one of the answers: we were here because we wanted to run a meetings and training centre. But would the transition be possible? What would perceptions be locally to the loss of the town’s only hotel? Better ask them. So we joined the Chamber of Trade.
Sedbergh is fortunate in having a thriving Chamber of Trade. Such a body gives the business owners and traders in town a chance to exchange ideas and understand each other’s perspectives. It provides a co-ordinated focus for the voice of the business community and collective clout when dealing with officialdom. It also gives the various characters in town a periodic outlet to unwittingly display their idiosyncrasies to all around and it is a wonderful source of gossip.
The first local character we came across was Tricia. Tricia was the chairperson of the Chamber of Trade’s Tourism Committee. She ran a bed and breakfast in town. Her husband had a profession that we were to find quite widespread in these hills; he was a marketing consultant with a business card and computer and, from what we could gather, very little in the way of identifiable customers. A marketing consultant is presumably someone who helps you sell things, and Tricia’s job was to sell the town to potential visitors. With an expert for a husband, she should have been, on the face of it, well positioned to do this, she was, though, a person whose bonnet had an unfailing tendency to become a bit overcrowded with bees; the sort of person who, given a stick to grab hold of, has a natural inclination to seize the wrong end of it. Her main obsession at the time was to get the town signposted from the motorway. This seemed rather a strange issue to get steamed up about, since the town already was signposted from the motorway, Tricia, though, wanted “the Yorkshire Dales” signposted from the motorway at the same junction, the theory being that people would say, “Golly gosh, I didn’t know we could get to the Yorkshire Dales from here, let’s go there and on the way see whether we can find a charming B&B about five miles down the road, run by a lady with the appealing name of Tricia&rdquop;.
My impression, not backed up by formal research it must be admitted, is that very few people actually do this; that most people who undertake a journey on the M6 motorway have some idea of where they intend to end up before they begin. To sow this seed of doubt, though, was sacrilege. And the odd thing is, I have since discovered when attending meetings of tourism venue operators, that there is always a vociferous someone, in every town, who wants their particular location better signposted from the motorway. Objectively it may seem somewhat naïve to believe that a roadsign identifying your spot is going to attract visitors more than any other road sign pointing to any other charming spot, but the people of local action groups certainly believe it will. It is a big issue.
Road signs, road signs. I suggested that perhaps we could focus on something that Sedbergh had that was different from elsewhere.
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, the must be lots of things? The Quakers, maybe.” The area in which we live is of significance to the Society of Friends, the Quakers, having one of the oldest Friends’ Meeting Houses in the world and being the area where George Fox, the semi-official father of the movement, is said to have first preached to a crowd of any significant size.
Tricia thought this could indeed be used as an exciting marketing opportunity, “We could hold a pageant; we could all dress up in black and white dresses with those flat Quaker hats and have a pageant in the Main Street. People would come from all over”.
“Do you think that may be a little over dramatic and in danger of back-firing? Quakers that I know tend on the whole to pride themselves on the simplicity of their lifestyle, and, whilst I am sure they are generally fond of pageants in principle, I think they may feel a little resentful of us lot all dressing up in silly hats on their behalf. Perhaps the town might have a better chance of success with this market by making a feature of vegetarian breakfasts.”
Tricia looked aghast. The Quakers need vegetarian breakfasts! Could this be true? We would have to check this out, so she took advice from the warden of the Friends’ Meeting House who confirmed that this might indeed be a better selling opportunity that flat hats and prancing. At our next meeting, Tricia had found the answer: “Scrambled eggs”, she announced proudly, “We do really special scrambled eggs. I put cream in them. People always say how good they are. It’s the cream, you see, that makes them so special. I can serve them to Quaker vegetarians for breakfast!”
I let the subject go, since Tricia was on a track with few junctions, however the issue raised itself again at a meeting some weeks later. We were each standing on one leg with a glass of sherry, talking to colleagues and visitors at a gathering, when one of the party, who happened to be politely listening to Tricia holding forth on some topic or other, announced gently that he was the custodian of the Quaker Tapestry, in Kendal.
“Aha!”, exclaimed Tricia enthusiastically, “We specialise in catering for Quakers round here, you know. It’s one of our Unique Selling Points.”
“You do?.” The man looked very pleased.
“Yes”, announced Tricia proudly and with an air of one about to announce a clincher, “We put cream in our scrambled eggs!.”
To his great credit, the man still made a passable attempt at looking pleased, but, perhaps wisely, asked nothing further.
The bees in Tricia’s bonnet included another potentially saleable aspect of our new home town: Lester the town drunk. Lester’s daily routine was to wake from the tent, caravan, shed or bench where he had found to sleep that night and wander on bandy legs into town for a wash and brush up. Part of this involved sitting for a while in one of the cubicles of the town’s proud public toilet, and when Lester performs his ablutions, he sings – in a loud, booming, masterful and amazingly tuneful voice. Lester then spends the rest of the day in the Main Street, trying to cadge a couple of pounds from anyone who responds to his cheery greeting, and whenever he succeeds he then makes use of the takings by talking some other hapless passer-by to buy him cans of beer from the supermarket. The shops will not sell beer to Lester in person, and they will not sell beer to anyone who appears to be buying it to give to Lester, so Lester’s day is a round of intrigue, worthy of many a hard-working person, only somewhat wetter, colder and less well paid.
The town’s traders get very upset by Lester. They feel that someone singing in the public toilet lowers the tone of the area and chases visitors away. Whether this is actually true, or whether the songs resounding down the street, using the lavatories as an impromptu megaphone, has the effect of adding a charm that visitors come back to experience is hard to measure, enough that the traders feel it a markedly negative influence.
Lester’s loud and melodious voice leads to an opportunity for fun for the local children, for whom the facilities for something to do are generally somewhat limited compared to their counterparts in the bigger conurbations. Once Lester had managed to get a few cans inside himself, the youth would get him singing. By starting in unison with a song that Lester knew most of the words to they had no difficulty in getting him to join in. Reverse pied-piper fashion they then lead him down the street until they were outside Tricia’s house where they would stop, wait for Lester to be completely carried away in musical reverie, and then ring Tricia’s doorbell and run. Tricia comes out and, with the town’s youth smirking in doorways and Lester singing obliviously and enthusiastically on her doorstep, loudly and vehemently does her nut. Lester finds someone is paying him attention and breaks off his performance to ask Tricia if she could see her way to lending him a pound, thus generating an even greater degree of rant on her part. Such simple youthful pastimes are of course now passed, we came in at the end of them, now the diversion involves mobile telephones and over-early sexualisation, but at the time, we were beginning to like our new-found home.
Another friend, Derek, also ran a bed and breakfast business. Derek had a long untrimmed ginger beard, his countenance rather determined and forthright, and was given to wearing a kilt, though nobody quite knows why except that he occasionally liked to lift it to display his schoolgirl-style navy blue underwear, though he was fairly selective in whom he chose to do this to, not wishing in any way to give offence to anyone. Derek’s prime obsession, though, was dog shit.
“My son was asked to do a project at school about pollution and I said to him, you don’t need to go searching the oceans for evidence of that, I took him down to the Main Street with a camera and we photographed all sorts of evidence for his essay, while the visitors sat in the bus shelter eating their lunch.” “And”, said Derek proudly, “he got a damn good mark for it, too.”
Derek would remonstrate with anyone he saw allowing their dog to foul the pavement. He was struck dumb one day, though. “I saw this lady letting her dog do its business right outside my house. I went out to ask her why she doesn’t take him to her own garden to do that sort of thing, before I could get to the gate, along came a friend of hers, looked down at the dog, said, ‘Hello, Tiddles, I haven’t seen you for a while’, then bent down and gave the bloody thing a kiss, when only two seconds before, it had been LICKING ITS ARSE!”.
When Derek raised this issue at a meeting, in his angry, comma-strewn tone, I thought it was the funniest thing I had heard since Sunday, and I wondered why the other participants in the meeting looked so horrified, as if Derek had inappropriately raised a taboo subject. Surely dog shit cannot be that taboo, in these enlightened days? I eventually discovered that the subject was indeed forbidden at meetings of the Chamber of Trade, as it was at Parish Council meetings and all local meetings at all levels in all locations around the country, except in very small and limited doses, the reason being that once the local people get onto the subject of dog shit, there is no getting them off it, and all other business gets put so far down the agenda that nothing else can ever get a look in, a spirited discussion around the ins and outs of dog shit, is unstoppable.
Selling a town on the basis of its plethora of inappropriately-placed dog shit was beyond our marketing skills, and did not fit, either, with the local traders’ idea of how they wanted to perceive themselves, so the subject was largely out of bounds. So what did they have to sell? What was it about our new area that caused people to want to come here, rather than drifting somewhere else?
The local traders, when asked, wanted more than anything else to have people come to admire the beauty of the hills. To us, this did not seem a very sound business approach since, nice as the hills are, there are lots of places in the world with hills, each with a charm of its own, and with the somewhat greater appeal that, though it might rain there, the phenomenon of days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months of rain – in our area you can sometimes go for 60 or 90 days during which only three or four will be rain-free – are less likely than it would be here to dampen the appeal. It left us puzzled. We were the new boy and girl, everyone wished us well, but had we elected to emulate the write-home qualities of Tricia or Derek, we rather felt the town might only half approve. The town was searching for a conventional respectability, when among its strengths lay its very eccentricity.
We would have to invent a reason for appealing to potential hotel guests. It is a picturesque country area, but then so are lots of others. It has some good country walks, but then so do lots of places. It has the public school, Sedbergh School, which would certainly be a source of business, when parents of the boarding pupils come to visit, however we could think of little in our control to induce these parents to visit their offspring more often than they do, and with the proximity to the London to Glasgow motorway, the M6, they probably stay over less often than they once did. The M6 itself could be a possibility, if we could find a way of letting the many people who travel that way know that a break of journey in our corner of the trip would be a very good thing, preferably making them aware of this some time before they saw the forthcoming and much desired road sign, which above all other road signs was, we were assured, guaranteed to pull the punters in. Hmmmm.
We were new, we were doing something new, and what is more, we were not married.
The extent to which not being married would create a problem was an area of initial doubt for us. We spent our 20’s and 30’s living in London, where there were people, such as ourselves, who had found their marriages unsustainable, primarily through a growing apart of two people who increasingly wanted different things out of life and who were tending to hold each other back and cause unhappiness and frustration that seemed impossible to reconcile. Some of these people ended up alone, others, like ourselves, found someone else with whom we developed a relationship, all the while worried about the danger of repeating the pattern.
We expected that in moving to the heart of Middle England we might be regarded as the accentors of all that is considered morally decadent about an increasingly valueless society. We would have to work hard to assure the local people that we were not there to destroy the very fabric of their lives and cause a diminution of attendance at the church. But we were wrong. We had believed what we were being told by the politicians. And at our age too! We should have known better than that. In our respectable Middle English enclave, just about everyone is living with someone who used to be married to somebody else. What is more, there seemed to be little of the stoical heart-searching that we had found in our city-based iniquity.
One of the first incidents that drew this phenomenon to our attention was when we began to receive positive feedback about the quality of food in one of the local pubs. The food was reported to be getting better. We asked people the reason for this and were told it was because the landlord had eloped with the chef, leaving his wife to do the cooking. The chef had been pretty bad at cooking, but presumably very good at seducing at the landlord.
Then we kept noticing the coal wagon parked outside a particular house every lunchtime. We assumed the coalman lived there, but that shows how naïve we were. Even the next door neighbour was fooled for a while, thinking to herself, “My, they’re getting a lot of coal delivered”. But she should have known better because she it was who had parted from her husband and gone to live with one of the local businessmen. They had begun their living together by going on holiday, having been unusually successful in keeping their relationship secret up to that time. The businessman had gone on holiday with a girlfriend, that much everyone knew. What they had not yet found out was who the girlfriend was. It took a number of days for the population to work it out, which they achieved by a process of elimination to see who in town was missing.
To us, urbane capital city types, this all came as something of a moral shock. Here we were, new to the business, new to the area, up from the wicked city, with a mission to provide a service which was in short supply to serious-minded business folks, and everyone around us seemed to be concerned with little else but bonking. It is one of those points of knowledge that is suppressed from the public gaze, we have since discovered. This amoral society about which we hear so much. This casual attitude to relationships. This dozy-doe of partners at a whim. It turns out not to be these dark skinned okra-chewing foreign people in the dusty inner cities. It’s the moral majority! We were quite shocked.
We should not have been shocked, had we been a little more widely informed than we were at the time. In the early 1920s a man from a well-to-do family, Gerald Brennan, kind of cracked up following the First World War and went off to Spain; he wrote a book about his experiences called South From Granada. In that book, he observed a phenomenon somewhat related to droit de seigneur or ius primae noctis, the old right of a feudal lord to take the virginity of the young women on his estate on her first night of marriage (if such a right actually ever existed). Brennan reported on the custom of young women who worked in the service of a landowner to become his mistress, and subsequently to get married to a man who, as a kind of reward for his complicity in this, would be set up in a desirable occupation. As Brennan points out:
“One of the more useful invention of the Catholic Church has been the institution of godparents. In rural communities this relationship helps to consolidate the blood links formed by concubinage between the landowner and the people who work for him.”
And in elaborating on this tendency to forge a coherent society in general:
. . . “ the group has to be soldered together wherever possible by moral and religious links, that is by intermarriages, sponsorships, extramarital relationships and personal friendships. In this way mutual obligations are given a certain sanctity.”
Of course, that was about Catholic Spain, and Sedbergh is neither Catholic nor Spain, but it is a rural society of long standing, and perhaps these links through relationships that Brennan was observing are more universal, and have just become a little more democratised, as the distinction between Lord of the Manor and servant classes has broken down a bit. Perhaps we were seeing the fabric of a stable and mutually supportive community at work. Perhaps.
The other thing about life in the countryside which surprised us, this idyllic life that we hear people telling us on the radio is in such dire need of preservation, was the poverty. In Cambridgeshire, where we had emigrated from, we had heard about the people known as the sludgers. Contacts who had been to school in towns such as Ely told of fellow pupils who arrived each day out of the Fens, played little part in the social or academic life of the school, and then when the minimum legal age that they could leave came around, disappeared back into the muddy fields and were never seen or heard of again. Hence the sludgers. We knew of the sludgers, but they were in quite a minority.
Here in the hills there was far less sludge, but the phenomenon was much more apparent. Rural families living in geographic isolation, in houses that many people would class as near-derelict, in immense poverty, and with little chance of breaking out of it as their means of livelihood is gradually being eroded. A school of 200 pupils can be something of a scary culture shock to the children of such a family, these children therefore tend to arrive on the bus at school each day, keep their heads down and take as little part in anything as possible, then when the time comes that they can leave they go back into the hills and become whatever the high-altitude equivalent is of a sludger. (To be fair, the teachers in the schools work hard to try and broaden the horizons of the high-altitude sludgers, with varying degrees of success.)
This, too, was something new to us. Of course, we all know that national journalists only leave Notting Hill Gate with poor grace and under duress, so perhaps we should not have been so surprised about this unreported phenomenon of Dickensian deprivation at the end of the 20th century, but we were surprised, nonetheless.
These people did not even have a generic name, they were just the children from the hills. Even the sludgers have more of a persona than they do. And what happens to them? In detail, we do not really know. We guess that these are the youths who, when they get a little older, get married to others of the same personal experience and have their wedding photograph published in the local paper. Their hobbies are horses and cooking (actually, that is the public image, and omits shooting rabbits), their honeymoon will be a couple of nights in a local hotel, or possibly a trip to Scotland or Wales, or as we have seen just once, a fortnight at Alton Towers, after which they will make their home on the farm. One of these wedding reports showed a grinning girl in a white frock, whose attendants (for every wedding must have attendants) were her best friend Emma, and Skippa the sheepdog. This is a world of which we knew, and still know, very little. A closed world. A world that is going to find the high-tech, feast-and-famine, perpetually Peter Pan-ish, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the future increasingly alien. It is a world that goes unreported among the propaganda that life in the country is an ecologically balanced, hunting, shooting and fishing, idyll. It is a world that is inevitably under threat, as it becomes progressively destitute and as wealthy people from the cities move out of town. Cumbria, eventually, will become Surrey, with casualties along the way. The casualties, naturally, will be the poor. These very people. Though only casualties in as much as they will feel threatened for a while, before becoming assimilated into the mainstream and then, with any luck, better off.
Such people were not our customers, though. How could they be, on their income? Our potential customer base came from the better-off people. The people who ran businesses or who were of the professional classes, the professional farmers, doctors, teachers, shopkeepers and management consultants. These people knew what we should do with our business.
“You need to appeal to the locals”, they said.
Maybe they were right. Perhaps we could fill this need instead of being a meeting centre, since we were here. After all, we were new and considerably green, and for all our fancy theories about the changing tastes of the land and looking towards a fat-free tomorrow, what did we know about it? In our self-important and assumed businesslike manner we researched the subject. We asked around, and the answer seemed to be a consistent one. What the local people wanted was:
Large quantities
Low price
Plain food, nothing fancy
This is surprising in a way, for it is essentially quite nonconformist. All the written wisdom told us that the move generally is towards improved quality and a greater internationalism, and that price for most people is not the most significant factor. Farmers, above all, are insistent that the public should be encouraged to focus on the quality of the meat they buy and be dissuaded from being tempted by lesser-quality lower-priced imports, and we are in a farming area.
Farmers, though, if and when they go out to eat, seem to have a policy which conflicts with their publicity message: never mind the quality, feel the price. The business professional with a mobile phone and suit, who had been advising the Chinese restaurant to stick to a Chinese product, might subsequently be engaged to advise the farmers that, if they say one thing and do another they can expect to find support within the country difficult to maintain, a condition that they indeed seemed to be finding themselves in. A restaurant business geared to a customer base of rural folk, was going to be a hard one to develop. Too hard for us, probably.
We had inherited a small hotel trade, too, and from what we could gather they were looking for much the same priorities as the restaurant clientele, except that they were less concerned about the large quantities. Many of our acquired staying guests were elderly and seemed most of all to want twin beds, a private toilet, and dinner no later than 7pm.
Is there a market here? Little concession to changing tastes; low price; never mind the quality of the meat; a private toilet and dinner starting at 6 p.m. Can it be done? Of course the answer is yes, there is a market for everything. We have found a number of establishments doing quite well on precisely this trade. It is a hard one to sell to, since the people are diverse geographically and socially, but on the positive side it is year-round and is essentially not short of money. Was that what we wanted to do, though? Our problem with catering to a dying market was, that we thought there might be little future in it. Where could we take this business? How would one develop it? In the short term it would not be too difficult. Attention to detail and an organised mailing system should have a reasonably rapid payoff. But it feels too fragile, too subject to change which would be hard to monitor, too much following and not enough leading.
So what was our product to be? Should we become a restaurant and bar for the locals, a bolthole for elderly folk – both of these would have the advantage of starting from an existing customer base – or should we start again from scratch? The advantage of the start again option would be that we could practise with our existing customers before taking risks with the people we really wanted to impress and retain. Yes, that sounds a sensible approach. We’ll use the existing customer base as guinea pigs, make our mistakes on them, then discard them and do the job properly with the new lot. It’s a harsh world out there.
We were beginning to understand the selling points. People came to stay at Derek’s, to be entertained by Derek. People came to Tricia’s to be entertained by Tricia. When visitors were in town, they liked to be entertained by Lester and the rest of the town’s characters. Where did this leave us? Whenever we asked anyone about this, they almost invariably said, “Susie and George”.
Susie and George had been the proprietors of our hotel two owners previous. In fact they had turned the house into a hotel, in 1979, having bought it to do precisely that. It had been six years since the time that Susie and George finally gave up and went on to other things, but still everyone harked after the good old days when the hotel had been such a fun place to go. We had better find out why. It was not too difficult to track down Susie as she was still in the Chamber of Trade and was now running an antiques shop and B&B in town. We asked her what had made the place such a success and why she had felt it necessary to sell when the entire town loved her so.
“Not charging enough. Not making any bloody money!”, she replied.
That explained the second part, but what about the first? With some research, we discovered the reason. It was George.
George was a good, old fashioned, professional front man. He did not believe in kettles and teacups in bedrooms, George brought a tray of freshly brewed tea to each guest’s bedroom every morning. All the things you get points for in the hotel classification standards, George did not do. The furnishings should be clean and bright? George’s were threadbare. But he would organise the guests into two teams to play party games, or he would play the piano to them and sing, or he would tell them stories. No official points for this, but it caused an international clientele to return again and again. We watched George in action one night when some visitors form the USA insisted on bringing him and Susie to our hotel for dinner, to re-live the old days. After dinner, George got going in the bar, holding his audience with a technique worthy of Adolf Hitler, periodically turning his back on them and then, when they thought they were free to breathe, swinging round and coming back with another diatribe.
The presentation started when one of the guests spoke about a television comedy program where a dead body had been found in a hotel bedroom. Oh, what a hoot it was. George recounted his own experience, dating from some years back when he had been head waiter at a local hotel and restaurant. His story revolved around a couple who had been regular visitors to the hotel, the man rather older than the woman, and one night the woman had come running downstairs at dinner time, saying she though her chap was dead. She was greatly distressed and George had tried to sympathise, saying what a shock it was to him and his staff, too, what with she and her husband having been such regular guests over the years, and such a sprightly man, too, the way he would run up those stairs. Between her blubberings the woman had eventually made it clear that that was not quite the cause of her upset, what was really causing her so much distress was that, though George had known her as the gentleman’s wife, the real Mrs Gentleman was in fact at home watching television. George recounted how he had bit his lip to save himself from commenting on how he now understood why the old fellow was so nimble in getting up those stairs. Anyway, on bringing the body downstairs as discreetly as possible so as not to alert the guests eating in the dining room, they dropped the coffin and it slid down the stairs with a great clatter. As George remarked later, the old chap might have gone up the stairs pretty fast, but not half as fast as he eventually came down them. And that was not the end of the matter. The following day George had the greatest difficulty convincing the chambermaid that it was safe to enter the dead man’s bedroom to clean it, finally convincing her that he would be right outside the room in case of any spookies. The chambermaid had not been in the room for more than a few seconds before she let out an almighty scream and rushed to meet George in the doorway, shaking and quaking and jabbering in his arms. For there, as she had lifted the pillow from the bed, she had been confronted with a grinning set of the dead gentleman&rsuo;s false teeth.
If you can imagine a tall thin Adolf Hitler telling this story to an audience of followers, that will be George.
The effect on the guests of George’s antics was to loosen them up and get them talking to each other like old friends, so that of course they all had a wonderful time. Two of the guests that day happened to be personal friends of ours, Andrew and John. They lived in a tiny terraced house in Cambridge and mentioned their home town to another pair of guests, Americans, who became quite excited, wanting to know all about where to go as they were due to visit Cambridge the following week.
“Well, you must come and stay as our guests”, said the ever sociable Andrew and John. An invitation that the Americans accepted with enormous pleasure.
The first we heard of this was when Andrew knocked on the door of the kitchen in a state of great anxiety. He had glibly made this offer and only afterwards considered the practical implications. The American couple were fat and wide, so fat and wide there was no possible way in which they would fit through Andrew and John’s tiny Cambridge front door. And even if they had somehow been levered through the front door, they would then have had to negotiate a tight turn in the hall and into the sitting room. It was just so embarrassing. What were Andrew and John to do? We suggested recruiting the help of the neighbours to somehow lever the visitors in, but that did not seem very appealing. Fortunately, though, Andrew had left a get-out, having told the American couple that their visit would be subject to him checking his diary, which his cold sweat in the kitchen had been an excuse to go and find. It was a time for a bit of risk-taking. He would tell them he was out on Tuesday, and hope that was the day the American couple planned to be there. And. Phew! It worked.
George all this while was trying to enthuse everyone to join in, “Just a Song at Twilight”, to his piano accompaniment, quite oblivious to the trouble he had caused by getting everyone to be so sociable.
So here we were, we had arrived in a town full of eccentrics, each in their own right eminently saleable as a tourist attraction, and exponentially saleable as a combined tourist attraction, and all the good burgers of the town wanted to do was to extol virtues that were to be found in a million other towns. We were just too small a voice to be able to swing this one. We would have to do our own thing, to invent a product that was not specifically related to the location we were in, but which worked on its own merits. The Chamber of Trade, for all its value, was not going to be any use when it came to making our product.
We shall stick with our original idea. There is merit in the other approaches but let’s stick to our plan. The local people are used to dealing with crazy newcomers, they’ll think we are airy-fairy and amateur and unable to sustain it for long. If they are right they will feel vindicated and if they are wrong they will feel proud of us. Either way they will have won, so they will be happy. We shall develop an identifiable product and get a new client base upon which we can build.
Right?
Right.
How?
The physical product was not too difficult to imagine. We knew it before we bought the place. It focused on high-quality furnishings without the drapes and frills that seem to pass for quality in so many places, and on fresh food with an international bias, which gave the customer an experience of taste and put them in a frame of mind conducive to the development of intellect and work. We would be clear about our style and so appeal to those who respond well to that style and not provide something on false pretences to those who preferred a different one.
A hotel is in a difficult position in advertising its style, as it is hard for the potential customer to see what is on offer before buying. If you have a shopfront, the customer can usually look in to get a picture of the type of establishment you are. Most people will know just from looking at a hairdressers whether it is the place for spiky perms or blue rinses and increasingly this strong identification is becoming true of restaurants. But if you are a hotel it can be much more elusive to achieve. Many hotel customers book before seeing the place, naturally so since they are likely to know they will need the service in advance and while they are somewhere else. The shopfront therefore tends to be conducted by proxy. Somehow you need to let people know the style of your product before they are in physical viewing range.
Of course, there were the guidebooks. Coming into the business green and fresh, we assumed that the guidebooks were impartial, whereas a few enquiries soon revealed that all you need to do to get into a guidebook, is to pay (Michelin is, or was, the one great exception). Once we found we had to pay what seemed to be quite a high price, we spent a little time researching what it was we were paying for. This seemed an especially pertinent thing for us to do as the guidebook producers justified the cost above all else with the value they were providing for one’s ‘marketing’.
At first, we had little time to do this, we simply paid to go in the guidebooks. Two incidents prompted us to bring this issue further up our list. The first was the visit of the AA inspector. We knew it was the AA inspector from the moment we took the booking. Out here in the countryside, people usually only ever come for a reason and with a little practice you can usually tell what the reason is from an initial telephone conversation. This chap did not fit any pattern. He could only be the AA inspector, we knew he was going to be that before we ever saw him. Our suspicions were 95% confirmed after he arrived and we sent someone to the car park to take a look at his car. There on the front grill was something practically nobody has these days – an elaborate chrome AA badge. So he was the AA inspector all right. And he was. He announced himself the following morning and went through his list of observations, which we listened to with great interest.
It is not widely understood by the hotel-staying public that the star system used by the hotel monitoring associations has little to do with quality. We would be a two-star hotel. We knew that. We would not be a one-star hotel because we fulfilled all the criteria for being two star, for example all of our bedrooms had en-suite bathrooms. We would not be a three-star hotel because we did not, and never would, fulfil the conditions for being three-star. For reasons of practicality and space we did not have a 24-hour reception or two armchairs in every bedroom.
If we served breakfast with green slime in our fingernails and dribbled over the guests, we would not be downgraded from two- to one-star. The AA might refuse to put us in their guidebook, though this would be very much a last resort. What would actually happen would be that the inspector would point out to us what we were doing wrong in his opinion, and would set our percentage grading low. In addition to the star system denoting classification, a hotel got a percentage grading, supposedly denoting quality.
We were granted 66%, which seemed harmless enough. What could we do to make this 100%? The inspector did not really approve of the question. He told us some things which needed attention, all of which we knew already, but did not give any indication of whether, the improvements being done, we would be granted 67% or 97% for the result, nor what we could actually do to become 100%. All he did was to point to some repairs and cosmetics which we were already acutely aware of. So to find out the value of our prospective actions in terms of a guidebook percentage grading in order that they might be prioritised, we decided to do some research of our own.
At the time the Internet was in its infancy, but CompuServe had the bulk of the AA hotels guidebook available online, and we were a subscriber to CompuServe. I downloaded to my computer the entire AA registered hotels in this region of England, and then sorted the results by star rating and grading. I found from this that there was a marked correlation between percentage grading and cost of a room. In other words, the more you paid the better the grading you were likely to encounter. The more up-market a place was, the more it could put its prices up, the higher quality grading it would be entitled to. The grading system was saying nothing about quality in terms of value for money, it was simply saying that, the more you paid the higher grading you saw. This did not seem to be all that useful, really. Surely, all the hotels of a given room rate were not all of the same value for money; surely some were a better deal than others?
From our point of view it meant that in order to gain the higher grading, we would have to look at what in effect was a single target market, the higher price range, dressed-up dinner-out style. The AA seemed to be telling us that this was the only option for improvement and this message was reinforced by most of the major guidebook publishers, and by the Tourism Authority. At the time when we were trying to decide our product focus, knowing from all that we had seen and heard about product focuses in life in general that the more specific and identifiable we could be about this the greater chance there was of succeeding with it, while the official hotel experts appeared to be insisting that there was really only one focus to aspire to, an expensive one. Had they been studying a different management training manual?
In true naïve nutcase fashion, I wrote to the AA with my findings, and asked for their advice on how, using their relatively expensive promotional methods, an establishment such as ours might tell its potential customers about its Unique Selling Points.
The response I received would have had many a person in business fired, or if not fired shouted at, or if not shouted at then the butt of jokes by the typist. First, the letter from the AA hotels department said that they understood that times were hard in the current economic climate and that, given time, things will improve. (I am told that people in senior positions in serious companies have been dismissed for taking an attitude such as this). Second, the reply pointed out, rather condescendingly I thought, that if the AA asked all the establishments on their books what their unique selling points were, they would all say something different &ndash the AA did not want anyone to be different, silly, so they had no intention of asking!
From that instant, we stopped paying to go in official guidebooks.
Subsequently we have learned that the Tourism Authorities in every guise are fixated on standards. They research users of serviced accommodation and find that the customers’ highest priorities are cleanliness and friendly service and they base their lists of requirements around this. In these days of customer discernment, this attitude seems to be stuck firmly in the past. Take almost any consumer product and you find the customer is given a choice based upon what they perceive is most appropriate to their needs. If someone wants a new motorcar, they can base their decision on safety, speed, comfort, economy, zippiness, image and fashion. Not all of these, just some, different attributes for different customers. If someone buys a new pair of shoes they may place their priority on looks, comfort, durability or styling. Different people have different priorities for different circumstances. If someone wants a hi-fi they look in the relevant magazine and are presented with choices based upon a range of classifications, most of which I do not understand, so that I wish, like many others before me, that there was just one choice, good, bad or indifferent, so that I can choose the good. But that is not how it works. You buy those features that seem important to you. It is our civilised way of doing business that sets us apart from the archetypal, grey, Soviet style that became so discredited over the decades.
If someone wants a hotel do they go for . . . er, they can’t. The tourism authorities resist this move into the now. A hotel should be one star, two star, three star or four star. That is simple, and the research has shown that people want it kept simple. Yes, of course they do, don’t we all. Yet looking around us, reading the literature and between the lines, it seemed that the most successful places were those with a clearly identifiable style. Not everyone wants the same thing and any one person may want different things at different times. Identify your product! Every piece of (non hotel-based) expert advice exhorted this. This clearly meant steering well clear of the tourism authorities, for whom standards and quality are absolutes: do not be different, do not be individual, we’ll mark you down for that.
At about this time we happened to watch a television programme about AA hotel inspectors, one of whom had what he obviously thought was the great misfortune to visit a bed and breakfast where the woman whose home it was kept 47 cats and had a husband whose pleasure was to drive a model train around the perimeter of their garden.
“It smells of cats”, advised the inspector with his nose suitably crimpled, “I cannot give you more than one Q”. (Guesthouses and B&Bs were different from hotels, they got Qs instead of stars).
“Well of course it smells of cats”, we shouted at the screen, “What do you expect it to smell of if there are 47 of them?. For someone with a love of cats this accommodation could be a positive delight. For someone who is allergic to the hairs it would be a nightmare. What does one Q tell you?” The AA inspector could not hear us, so he awarded the establishment one Q. No mention of cats or garden railways in the guidebook.
Here we were then, new, green, inexperienced. And distinctly on our own. We had, though, some time on our side. Not a lot, because we would run out of money, but we had a business, we had customers. We were learning and we could experiment. We were developing our ideas. While in the background we worried about the form that the future would take, the front door would suddenly open and someone surprising walk in. Just like a theatre. In fact better than a theatre, more ridiculous and so more real. For example there was Magteld.
Magteld arrived shortly after we took over. I came out of the kitchen to find a woman standing in the hall, with bright orange hair and fingernails painted alternately red and black.
“Oh, no”, she said in a throaty Dutch accent, “I cannot stay here!”
“Why not?”
“Because you do not allow smoking in the bedrooms.”
One of the first changes we had made, on account of those holes we found in the bedsheets when we took the business on, was to ban smoking in some of the bedrooms and to put a notice on the price list at reception that announced proudly, ‘We Have Non-Smoking Bedrooms’. We did not at that time feel confident enough to declare all our bedrooms non-smoking, so we left the grubbiest-looking two for people to burn more holes in the sheets. (How things have moved on in the space of less than 15 years, that we were insufficiently confident at the time to tell people they could not smoke a cigarette wherever they chose!)
“We do have some bedrooms where you can smoke, though unfortunately they are currently occupied. You could always put your head out the window for a quick puff when I’m not looking.”
“No, I could not do that, that would be dishonest.”
“All right then, you can do it when I am looking, but you’ll still have to put your head out the window.”
“Well, I like it here, and I like you, but I am still worried about not being able to light up a cigarette first thing in the morning. I cannot get up, until I have smoked a cigarette.”
And I had already determined that I must not deny myself the fun of accommodating Magteld.
“The bed is not so far from the window, you can lean over and put our head out to have a puff before you get out of bed, provided you promise me, absolutely and faithfully promise me, that you will not burn a hole in the sheets, nor, indeed leave an unpleasant smoker’s smell actually in the bedroom. All the smoking must be done with your head out of the window. Other than that, I’m sure you’ll be happy staying here, and I shall be especially happy if you should choose to do so.". I was so taken with the red and black fingernails, I wished for sure not to let Magteld go.
In our early transition days, from the inherited clientele of a somewhat run-down hotel, to the state of enthusiastic party-shrieking business meeting socialising that we fondly imagined we were aspiring to, we had been playing host to an unremitting stream of couples with little or nothing to say to each other; the inhabitants of the dining room guaranteed to put off anyone looking through the door; the definitive “I don’t think so” invitation to potential other customers. Anyone who looked like they might stand a chance by contrast of livening up the dining room, we would tend to pounce upon, in the hope that their presence would act as a kind of PR and marketing windfall, and even better than free PR and marketing service, since they were paying us. Magteld looked like she might be a fine example of the beneficial type.
“What brings you to this area, may I ask?”
“I am walking the Dales Way with my husband, Jan.”
I looked around, but Magteld seemed to be quite alone, “Your husband?”
“Yes, he is walking along, behind me.”
“I may be missing something, but at the moment, I am not entirely able to see him. Er, could you point him out to me, possibly?”
“Ho, ho, ho. No. He is not walking along right behind me, he is some distance behind me. He will arrive shortly.” And some minutes later, during which time I had managed to persuade Magteld that, in exchange for my driving her and Jan to the starting point of her walk next morning in my leather-seated automatic-transmission company motor car with radio controls on the steering wheel (which I had not yet given back to my erstwhile employers) she would put her head out the window for her early morning cigarette; in marched Jan, who was unusual for an educated Dutchman in speaking very little English, or possibly, he choose the better part of discretion and let Magteld do all the talking.
Magteld and Jan decided to stay for a couple of nights, she had obviously taken to us us as much as we to her. After dinner, Magteld would come into to the bar for her post-dinner cigarette, (we had found burn holes not only in the sheets, but in many of the tablecloths too, and has banned smoking in the dining room too), and she would say, “I would like a whisky. A double. And Jan will have a single”.
She then would pose a question, for example: “Could you tell me something? Why do the sheep not fall over on the hills?”
“I suppose they have legs shorter on one side that the other. What do you mean, Magteld?”
“Ho, ho. No, I mean in Holland, where we don”t have any proper hills, only little boobles, the sheep are forever falling over, and when they do they are unable to get up and someone must put them upright or they will die.”
“I don't believe you.”
“It is true. Often when I am driving to work I have to stop to right a sheep. Somebody must do it as the sheep will not be able to get up on its own. Some mornings this makes me late for work.”
“Even less do I believe you.”
“It is true, Jan will tell you. Isn’t it true, Jan?”. She translates her story into Dutch for Jan.
Jan smiles and agrees that it is true, though, unknown to Magteld, my understanding of Dutch is sufficient to know that she is saying to Jan that she’s telling that old sheep uprighting story again. However, whatever the level of my disbelief, the effect on the other guests is great. They all have a wonderful time. Magteld downs a few more whiskies, a double for each of Jan’s singles, and keeps the place alive with her stories of floudering Dutch sheep. Everybody wins, except possibly Jan, who has had to make do with only half the amount of whisky.
We certainly gain, for when the time comes for Magteld to pay the bill, it is far more than she had budgeted for, mainly on account of all those whiskies.
“I don't want to see it!”, she announces clasping her left hand firmly over her eyes and holding out her right to me, “You just put the pen in my hand and guide it to the place on the credit card slip where I shall sign.”
And that was what I did, I took hold ofthe nicotine-stained red and black tiiped fingers and pointed the red-painted forefinger at the required place and pressed one of her black-painted ones down onto the pen. She wrote her name and went away with a wave and a smile. Bye bye, Magteld, you are a beneficial guest. You should receive a discount for doing us such service, but how can one put a price on that?
In among the concerns over where we were going and how we were going to get there, occasionally a Magteld would come along and make the whole thing worthwhile.
We should not be judgmental about the issue that many pairs of people do so struggle with animated chat. It should be their business, really, and not something for us to get involved in one way or the other, but unfortunately it is not only them, it is poor marketing for us. To see a dining room full of twosomes, sitting opposite each other and periodically whispering, “Potatoes are nice”. “Yes.” And then silence again for another ten-minute gap. Someone arriving upon this scene is not likely to feel they have struck it lucky and stumbled on just the perfect place. An Oakdene guest came to be a standing joke expression for us. An Oakdene guest is a married couple with nothing to say to each other. Sitting gloomily at the breakfast table, watching the rain pour down.
Our first summer was a very rainy one. Many of the guests had to struggle during breakfast, to find something that they could do that day without getting too soaked and miserable. We would do our best to stimulate conversation, generally trying to steer the subject towards sex, politics or religion, to make life a little bit interesting for them.
Not all elderly folk have nothing to say, of course. Some of our older guests we found gave us great delight, such as the two ex-teachers who had been students at Newnham College in Cambridge together in the 1940s. They were each about five-feet tall and came in beaming, having driven up from Devon in their Mini-Metro.
“Mr Currie?”
“Er, no.”
“Oh, well I think we are at the right place, we have a booking, I think.”
Having established their names, I agreed that they did.
“Then you must be Mr Currie.”
“No.”
“But you must be! Mr Currie telephoned us and explained that he would be taking over from the people we booked from. I was definitely Mr Currie, I can remember it quite clearly.”
They were quite indignant that I would not own up to being Mr Currie, and clearly expected the worst for their forthcoming stay. Who had telephoned them with a message about a new owner for the hotel was a mystery. It certainly was not us. We showed them to their rooms but they were still very suspicious about this uncertainty and doubtful that they were going to find it at all acceptable.
The following morning Hilary and I were eating our breakfast when a bullock walked past the window.
“What!”, we rushed outside to find a herd of bullocks in the garden. They had evidently escaped from a field during the night and had been wandering the road, before stumbling across the relative safety of our garden. Bullocks in the garden may be picturesque, but they are enormously heavy things and make big holes in the grass with every footprint. In the pouring rain and with a long stick and a piece of cable I managed to corral them into a corner of the garden to decide what to do next. This exercise had the bullocks trying to weave and swerve everywhere except where you want them to go, the way bullocks do, while the two elderly ex-teachers kangarooed down the drive in their Mini-Metro, dressed in their sou-westers and woollens in preparation for the day’s outing. I thought, “Oh, no, they’ll be thinking this Mr Currie is a cow-torturing maniac, as well as a liar!”
The best thing to do was to tackle the subject head-on, when they returned later in the day. “Did you see me trying to herd those bullocks in the garden this morning? They’d escaped from the farmer’s field and were going to cause havoc if I . . .”
“No, I don’t think we saw anything at all. No, in fact I’m sure we drove out this morning without seeing anything untoward whatsoever.” And they meant it. They had driven right past a man frantically waving a stick at a group of frisky and recalcitrant bullocks in the pouring rain, and had notice not a thing!
In fact they had had quite an eventful day, having stalled their Mini-Metro on a flooded section of road and been helped out by a charming policemen, who had pointed out that there was in fact a sign saying that the road was closed due to flooding, but agreeing that it must have been missing when they passed, since they had certainly not seen it.
From then on, it was downwind sailing all the way. They were delightful and entertaining, they soon got over my not being Mr Currie any longer and were above all most appreciative of the food, as we had by now made changes to the menu and were following a principle of not giving any guest a vegetable prepared in the same way twice during their stay. They thought this was very special.
We were still working hard on the menu, trying to make the food into something of a selling point. Not gourmet, that would be outside our experience, but varied, with fresh ingredients and a touch of adventure. This was in contrast to our inherited menu, which went from China to Maine and back, but had a rather deep-fried feel after its trip from the deep freeze. The menu of our predecessors did have one advantage from the point of view of many of our inherited customers, however, in that it was relatively long. This was still the age of the Margaret Thatcher School of Choice and the population had been told that to be whole and satisfactory people, they needed to have Choice. Choosing to be a vegetarian, or someone who places emphasis on unusual or sparkling tastes, was perhaps not in the ordained plan, but a long menu gives a person Choice.
We were struggling with this. Essentially, in a small establishment, to provide wide choice means to make wide use of the freezer and microwave and to match vegetables to main course on an entirely pot-luck basis. This was against what we saw as good business sense in the longer term. In the immediate term, it meant that some people, such as the two old ladies in their Mini-Metro, thought they had struck gold, other people felt they were being cheated.
We generally came to know from the initial telephone call or appearance in the hall, whether the caller would take to our developing style in a big way or disapprove of it. The difficulty was in letting them know in advance. There was no point in saying, ‘We are a hotel specialising in pure 1990s Good Housekeeping chic’, because those who would be attracted by such a statement would have picked it up from the conversation anyway, and those who would be appalled by it would not understand what we were talking about.
Tourist authorities and guidebook publishers: Help!
Not a hope.
To steepen our learning curve, we were, in addition to playing host to staying guests, operating a restaurant. This was on a small scale most of the time as the area we found ourselves in was sparsely populated and had little or no tradition of eating out. This made things even more difficult than normal, since everyone in the area wanted us to be just the place for them, there being not much else available to fit their bill, while the place for them tended to be on a once-a-year-it’s-my-wife's-birthday basis, and what my wife likes to eat, is roast lamb. Nothing wrong with roast lamb, just a little difficult to cater for unpredictable numbers and just a little bit uninspiring for those whose habit is to visit a restaurant more frequently.
Is there a business to be made out of this? Could we do what everyone says is essential for a growing business in the leisure industry, and strive continually to up the quality, whilst at the same time keeping every economically-challenged farmer happy about the price? It did not take much soul searching to come up with the answer: you can’t. It was the farmer’s wife's birthday or our future and the option did not take much selecting. The local market, or that part of it which shouted the loudest, was a downer. We would let someone else take that on. Plenty do try to take it on, we have subsequently come to see it over and over again. The restaurant is full. Oh!, so successful. What a busy place! But the owners are working 18-hour days for practically no return. What did these local experts think we were, stupid or something?
We had a hotel. We had some ducks. We were beginning to see the shape of our future business. We had a new home town, though selling it as a venue was going to be an uphill struggle since the inhabitants were so depressingly shy of their strengths. But all was not hopeless. There is a market out there for everything and though the people whose job it was to promote our product to that market seemed intent on putting obstacles in our way, we could cope with that. We just had to keep the hotel going while the changeover took place.
And still the rain came down, it hardly stopped raining in our first year and we had had plenty of opportunity to talk to the guests to give them something to do that kept them dry.
For example, there were the dentists, with considerable experience of working in remote regions of underdeveloped countries, whom I engaged in conversation one day after they had returned from a short outing in the pouring rain, and got into a discussion about leadership. This had started from speculation on the plight of developing nations, which itself had arisen from enquiries about their dentistry work in the remoter parts of central Asia, and was steered by me through the leadership strengths of Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher and Fidel Castro. The dentists, though, doggedly refused to move beyond Moses leading the tribes of Israel into the wilderness. No matter what tack I tried, Moses was their man.
When they had completed their stay with us, with much thanks for the help in overcoming the tedium of the rain, one of them pressed upon me a booklet which he urged me to read, saying how he had found it enormously informative and helpful in his travels through life. I thanked him politely and put the booklet on a table to look at later.
When I eventually got round to examining my gift, I found that it told me I was a sinner.
To be fair, the booklet did not pick on me personally as a sinner, it identified us all as sinners, and said that the only way to get better is by repenting. It was, in fact, an undoubted religious tract. We had spent the past months working seven days as week for sixteen hours or more per day. We had stayed up in the bar with the sociable late nighters, then risen to make breakfast for the pious couples with nothing to say to each other, who tended to arrive for breakfast ten minutes early, to get a good start on the day. We had spent hours agonising over the best way to direct our business, and hours of care in trying to make our current product first-class given the fabric of the establishment. We had slowly but surely got the place less burn-holed and cleaner. We had for the most part pleased most of the people most of the time. Somehow, whichever way we looked at it, we could not bring ourselves to feel like sinners.
And not only that, to have taken the advice of the book would have been a disaster for us. The one thing we had to do was to believe in our absolute abilities to make this thing work. No allowance for sin, we were going to come out virtuous. Our dentist’s tract fell on stony ground. Ah, well, a missionary can’t win them all.
Then Christmas came. And we invited the family.
This was a mistake.
When you are exhausted from the strains of starting a new business, the last thing you need is the family at Christmas. Auntie Mary peeled the carrots, everyone brought something to eat or drink, everyone contributed. Everyone was given a job to do, a special something they were especially responsible for. Ecological Uncle Jonathan’s job was lighting the fires. This was another mistake.
Soon after we had arrived in our hotel, we had received a visit from the fire officer. Rather in the same way that working in a sausage factory can make a person very cautious about eating another sausage, so being a fire officer naturally makes you aware of all the perverse ways in which a building might go up in flames. We were therefore instructed by the fire officer to be ultra-careful and to install as many detection gadgets as space would allow. For example, we should have smoke detectors in bedrooms, as someone may be in the en-suite bathroom when the television catches fire, and lo!, without an alarm going off they would be trapped. In the bathroom. Because the television had spontaneously burst into flames. It was a risk, you see.
I thought of the fire officer every evening from September, when evenings came earlier and we lit the sitting room and bar fires for the warmth and comfort of the guests. That bloody fire officer, he spent an entire afternoon telling us every means in the repertoire of how to stop the things from igniting, why didn't he also tell us how to get the bloody things to stay alight. We managed to succeed most evenings by using large amounts of chemical firelighters, that and an amount of hope in between cooking the dinner and serving at the bar.
Uncle Jonathan does not believe in chemical firelighters on ecological grounds, so the family had to wait on Christmas morning before opening its presents, while Uncle Jonathan knelt in front of the fireplace, with scrunched up newspapers, bits of twig, boxes of matches, and a great deal of blowing, puffing and growing irritation.
“Do what we have to do, Jonathan, throw half a box of firelighters at it!”
&ldquoChemical firelighters. Waste of the world's resources! Really!”
With everyone growing tired of looking at the shiny back region of Jonathan’s trousers while waiting for the warm cheering glow that the picture books had told them was Christmas, nephew Domino chimed high-pitched in to make matters a little more Christmas tense: “Kick him up the bum!”, he piped, “Tee hee, kick him up the bum. Ha ha. Tee hee.”
Part of our general exhaustion included a courtesy visit on Boxing Day to a meeting of local business people to drink large gin and tonics. By the time we returned from this we could hardly stay awake and were finding ourselves nodding off mid-conversation with sons and mothers. Very embarrassing, when in conversation with your mother, to find yourself suddenly waking up. Whose idea was this Christmas, anyway? Next year, we shall treat Christmas like any other day, for the sake of good, Christian, family unity. Since then, we have learned to avoid looking after our own family at Christmas and to look after other peoples’ instead. It is no less painful for the human race as a whole, but it certainly is for us.
And then by the end of the year, we had no money. This was not only because of an expensive Christmas, it was also because we had found the costs of developing a hotel business much higher than we had anticipated, and still many of the desired improvements were not even begun. If a business is making no money, there are essentially three things you can do. You can (a) sell up; (b) cut costs; or (c) sell more. Having rejected the invitation to be concerned about our predilection to sin, we decided we would try to sell more. We can sell our way out of this. We can overcome the problem of living and working in a sleepy part of the country and make it zing, can’t we? Er . . .
In fact we did eventually find a product focus. We were among the first largish houses in the country to come up with the idea of renting the entire house out to a group of people for a kind of houseparty. The Big House near Taunton and Polhawn west of Plymouth both fell upon this more-or-less the same time as us. It has proved to be exceptionally popular, so much so that there is probably more demand than there is supply; we, together with those few other places who saw the potential of this pretty-much independently, used the businees-development technique known as setting up a discontinuity in the market; looking to do something a little bit new. It took some time for people to get used to it, but once they did, they all wanted some. Our problem was that we were too small, but nonetheless we succeeded – against all the odds and by discarding all the advice, we succeeded. We focused our product.
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