Once again, a brief post.
This is because it is Easter and I am busily trying to pay my overdraft. It is not easy to compose coherent prose when the world is full of people either wanting just to go around the corner, or to know where a good pub is, or where they might find the lake.
My friend Paddy once got so fed up of this sort of whittering that he put a sign in his taxi windscreen which said: “This is not the Tourist Information Centre.” He took it out after he got fed up of people tapping on his window to ask: “So where is the Tourist Information Centre, then?”
I think that on the whole taxi drivers are not the best representatives of the customer service industry. About as far as Ambleside is my maximum for being polite to people, especially if they are painfully inebriated or in need of a jolly good bath.
Kitchen staff seem to be the worst offenders for the latter. In order to stay in nice hotels I have to ignore absolutely everything that I actually know about hotel and restaurant staff and their personal habits, otherwise I would take a precautionary dose of antibiotics before I set off.
The only bit of advice I would give to anybody else who intends to stay in an hotel this Easter is that you would be wise to be as charming and lovely as you can, and leave a good tip if you intend to go back. Don’t ask for anything not on the menu, don’t pretend you know about wine, make your order plain and simple. I can promise you that the loveliest of waitresses is not above spitting in your drink.
Of course as the Easter holiday grinds along we are all starting to get a little more tired and frustrated, approximately twenty thousand cars a day arrive in Bowness at this time of year. That is a lot of people who don’t know where they are going or where might be a good place to have lunch.
By midnight all of those people, the walkers and the nice old couples and the families with children, will be in bed. After that our customers will be exhausted sommeliers and chefs and spa attendants and receptionists. They will be feeling every bit as contented and charitable as you might expect, and will come out with the express intention of drinking absolutely as much as is humanly possible before the last nightclub closes.
The picture is Mark tidying up the garden today. In between driving taxis we are turning the house into the Disneyland Hotel, so we have been making the garden look beautiful.
It isn’t exactly beautiful yet but it is starting to look a bit less weedy.
