Postscript

WE SOLD OUR HOTEL IN 2006. We had never wanted to run a hotel in the first place. We had day jobs that we enjoyed doing and that we did not want to throw away, so we kept these on in a limited way while the hotel business came upon us. But once it did come upon us, we somehow and for some reason were determined not to let it beat us.

It didn’t beat us, we cracked it instead. But at much the same time our daytime occupations got busier and more demanding and we therefore had really no alternative but to stop. The marketing was not getting done, and if the marketing is not getting done, business will inevitably diminish.

But even if the marketing had not diminished, probably we still would have been wise to stop, because a business realistically cannot stand still, it either has to be growing or shrinking. And a hotel business has an inbuilt limit on growth unless you extend the building or take on another one. Extending the building was out of the question, and taking on another one, when we did not really want to be running hotels in the first place, did not seem a very attractive proposition. So we closed the accommodation business and stopped taking paying guests.

This left us living in a house that was far too big. What, for example, does a couple need a house for, that has thirteen bathrooms? So we decided to sell. It took nearly a year to find a buyer, but on 1st December 2006, thirteen years and four-and-a-bit months after we moved in and suddenly found ourselves hoteliers, we left Oakdene forever.

We were not sorry to see it go, a house with thirteen bathrooms takes a lot of maintenance, but we were sorry to say goodbye to our final remaining duck. Ducks had been born on the pond and ducks had come and gone, but our favourite was always Mrs Grey Duck. She had disappeared some years back, taken by a fox maybe or run over by a car or been stolen by someone wanting a duck or simply just died; she disappeared during a time when we were away for a few days. But one of her offspring, one of the two that had survived chickhood despite all the odds and obstacles, was still alive.

We never gave a name to Mrs Grey Duck’s offspring, he was just a motley duck, in fact very motley, a kind of black and white in completely asymmetrical pattern, but he survived. He could fly, but never chose to do so much, and so never left the general area of the pond. He was also unpopular with the other ducks; whenever there would be a group of them collect on the pond he would swim over towards them and they would turn their back and swim away. Quite what the social-interraction problems of this particular duck were – why the other ducks found him so repulsive – we had no idea. He looked like a regular enough duck to us; a bit motley in pattern but then so were some of the others. And of course he could never find a girlfriend.

Some ducks are like that. Born to be an outsider. Just like some people, and our job as hoteliers was to be kind to him, as it was to be kind to them. But we moved away. Left him behind and moved away. We know that you can’t organise your life just to please a single duck. But he didn’t know that. He spent his entire life as a shunned being. That is the way of life. We don’t know how much longer he lived after we’d gone.

And we don’t know how much longer our accommodation business could have survived after we’d gone either, for the nature of guest accommodation businesses is changing. The days of the guesthouse, B&B and small hotel must be numbered. It just is not possible to make enough from a small business like that, given all the demands of regulations, customer expectations, and rising costs. We suspect that we came in at the tail-end of the phase.

Actually, that is not quite true,