Keir Royale

What do you expect when you pay generously for a couple of nights in a child-friendly hotel on the Cornish coast?

- peace and quiet?
- yummy food?
- more Boden per square inch than you can shake a fist at?

All those things and more perhaps, but what you may not expect is a modern day Basil Fawlty, intent on parody.

There was no mention of the War, and no silly walking.
But there was plenty of ineptitude, a dollop of mis-management and some pretty incompetent apologising.

It started on our first night - one of only two, so it’s not hard to remember every not-so-perfect moment.

It was a half term treat.
Two precious nights in a decent hotel with lots of facilities for children.
On the first night, after tea in the kids’ dining-room, we delivered our two to their respective children’s clubs. Then we sighed with gratitude as we sauntered into the grown-ups’ restaurant.

We were looking forward to a relaxing meal on our own, with decent cuisine and attentive service. We’d been before and knew the restaurant was good.
But we shouldn’t have counted our spatchcocks.

Things headed downhill once the starters had been cleared.

We chatted and waited for the next course.
And we waited.
And waited.

There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing from a variety of waiters, each asking with a slightly lower dip of the head, whether we’d had our main course.

When we said,
“No, not yet,” each one would promise to sort it out.

But nothing happened and after about an hour we had to extricate the children and put them to bed.

Tempting them away from their new best friends and back into the bedroom was taxing enough, but to return to find not even a congealed plate of something lurking on a couple of plates was a step too far.

Not a sausage, or a spatchcock, or even a mangetout.

We were told our meals were -
a) on the hot plate
b) in the kitchen
c) at a secure site we’d have to locate using only bat-sonar before we could eat them

By the time the food arrived, the hotel’s own peculiar re-incarnation of Manuel had materialised.

He couldn’t have apologised more profusely.
If saying sorry were an Olympic event, I’ve no doubt he’d be up there on the top of the podium.

He didn’t just say “sorry, have a bottle of wine on us” and leave.
Oh no.
He had to explain why things had gone wrong, how they’d been allowed to go wrong, and how he was struggling with sub-standard agency staff who should really have been cleaning rooms and not waiting at tables.

He added yet more detail to the sorry tale.

Our meal had been cooked twice but on each occasion the waiter had failed to find us - sitting, as we were, smack bang in the middle of the restaurant.
The temporary staff were unfamiliar with the kitchen procedures - a kitchen so peculiarly out of synch with every other kitchen that it represented a daunting challenge to their powers of comprehension.
The wine waiter was really a commis chef on an evening’s sabbatical in the dining room.

Soon, other diners got wind of our troubles and were swapping notes…

“You ordered the Tiramasu! That won’t be here until Saturday.”

“If you’re lucky you might get the coffee in time for breakfast.”

“It’s the only restaurant I know that offers Soup of Yesterday”

The second evening was a different story.

We were sipping our coffee by 8.30pm, stunned into an amicable silence by the prompt arrival of our food and a constant flow of polite enquiries -

“Everything alright sir?”
“Have you enjoyed your meal madam?”
“Can I get you anything else?”

But the first night will be the one we remember… the vintage taste of Basil, lacking only Sybil to complete the picture.

Maybe we can save up for another trip to Cornwall - in the hope of meeting our modern-day Manuel’s good lady wife.

Beta Mum and Blog Fodder (aka Mike)

Well, apart from the guinea pigs getting divorced, things are much the same here.

I barely see the house in daylight.
Ben’s roaming free and tells (afterwards, when it’s too late to veto) of solo bike rides around country lanes.
Hannah is still yearning for Mulcie and Weezey - friends, not ailments.

And Mike? Well he’s coping.

The guinea pigs though, seem to have departed from their everyday tale of joined-at-the-hip sisterhood. And it’s all my fault, of course.

We were tiring of old, broken down, second hand hutches, found on dumps and in the local paper.

So I bought them a spanking new, two tier affair with a ramp to link the ground floor run to the first floor hutch.
But I’d forgotten how dim they are.

Normally they crush into one little igloo hideyhole together, leaving the other one empty.

Now though, only one of them can negotiate the ramp. So Phoebe’s taken to living on the top deck and descending occasionally to join her sister for food and playtime.

While poor, earth-bound Sandy is too scared to lumber her way up the scarey slope to the cosy night-time sleeping quarters. So she sleeps alone.

I’ve tried shoving her up the slope to join her sister, but she digs her little claws into the wood and makes feeble noises.

Perhaps she’s pleased to be rid of the snoring? Or maybe that’s me and a bit of wishful thinking…

Anyhow, enough of small creatures, I have a tag to reply to.

It’s from Potty Mummy, who wants to know things that will reveal my return to brain-dead working mode.

I have to tell you: -

What I’ve read.
What I’ve watched.
What I’ve listened to.
What I’ve surfed.

Well. I’ve just passed through a few years of re-reading long forgotten classics and discovering wonderful new authors. But that period is past and I’m now making up for years of minimal earning.

So what I’ve been reading will have you running for the door, at best.

The Spin Doctor’s Diary, by Lance Price.
It was £1 in the pound shop in Lincoln, so I wasn’t overly hopeful that I’d get much past the first chapter, but I did, eventually.
And some of it was quite fascinating.
A lot of it wasn’t.
Lance Price seemed to go on holiday a lot when he was working for Alastair Campbell, and he was left out of lots of major political decisions.

But the things he was involved in were gripping, and I realise now how carefully managed all that “news” was that we all saw unfolding on TV.
At the time I somehow didn’t quite believe it.

It’s a window into another world - bizarre and beyond belief.

I’ve also read -

- The Jersey Evening Post (every day, although not religiously)

- The Jersey Annual Social Survey 2007

- Scrutiny Code of Practice for States of Jersey

- a new anti-inflation strategy for Jersey

I think you get the picture…

What I’ve watched…

Well, I watch the news (ITV and BBC) every day, even if I have to catch it the next day on erratic “Watch Again” services.

I’ve been pining for CSI since January, as Jersey doesn’t yet have digital TV or Ch 5, and I’m too mean to pay for Sky.
So I’ve watched the first five minutes of a few things, a couple of DVDs of CSI, and some film Mike bought cheap in Woolworths, and that’s about it.

Oh, apart from Location/Relocation/Grand Design type programmes.
It’s great to feel even worse about our house-buying situation now we’ve moved to a place where the average house price is £435,000 - and that’s just for a three-bedroomed box house.

What I’ve listened to -

We left our CD/LP (yes, LP) system in Plymouth, intending to buy an MP3 speaker system. But we haven’t got around to it yet.
So we have no means of listening to anything other than the TV or radio, except on small, uncomfortable headphones.

I’ve listened to Radio 4, Radio Jersey, Channel 103, and I heard some McFly wafting out of some young bod’s open-topped car the other day when I had my window open at work.
A reminder of times past.

What I’ve surfed -

I’ve been trying to keep up with my regulars, despite lack of time.

Fab people like Mother at Large (presumably now becoming a little larger than usual); Omega Mum; Beta Mom; Potty Mummy; Dulwich Mum; SAHD; Mutterings and Meanderings; Rilly Super; MYA; Man About the House; Pig-in-the-kitchen… and others I’ve probably forgotten because of a mind overtaken with too many policy documents.

I’ve also been looking at (oh dear, not more) local government websites, websites constructed using Sharepoint, and other tedious work-related nonsenses.

So that’s about it really.
Not very edifying.

And now over to …

Spiral Skies and Super Mommy.

Let’s hope you have a more erudite selection than I.

Ben is ploughing through his latest Anthony Horowitz novel and dutifully he’s telling me about the swear word count – a lot of ‘hells’, several ‘bloodys’ and even one ‘bitch’.

He spells the words out to me to avoid any harmful impact on my obviously sensitive parental psyche.
He missed out the ‘t’ in ‘bitch’ - but I put him right.

Swear words have become quite an issue in his life and they’re proving a perplexing minefield through which to steer.

For instance, he and his friends at school were recently discussing the everyday activities of gnomes.
The perceived wisdom in the classroom, presumably Disney-inspired, is that they work all day and work all night.

Ben offered the thought,

“How do they get time for sex?”

Hmm, liberal parenting regime you might think – or just an early introduction to sex education (both true).

But his reflection was greeted with shocked silence.
He’d used the s-e-x word in the company of everyday country folk.

The outrage was reported to one of the lunch-hour supervisory staff who issued Ben with a formal warning, a serious sanction because three warnings in a week means the loss of Golden Time.

The loss of one weekly Golden Time session also means exclusion from the end-of-term treat, this Easter’s being a trip to the ten-pin bowling alley.

Ben’s a bit shocked by all of this.
What if he’d used a serious swear-word, one of the ones he picked up in the playground in Plymouth?

Or even one of the expressions (probably worse) he’s heard used by his parents at moments of extreme stress?

Perhaps in Jersey it’s a problem to say ‘Go-od’ in that expressive way his father has when computers play up?

Where do you draw the line?

Would ‘hell’ bring eternal damnation? Whoops I did it again.

Or is ‘damn’ okay if you add the ‘nation’?

Is ‘penis’ a good word or a bad one? And if it’s not acceptable, what should he call it?

His Mum once went to see a play called the Vagina Monologues, clearly he can’t mention that in the playground.

Grown-ups have such effing double-standards.

I seem to have been ousted…
Yours,
nostalgically,
Beta Mum

I bought a packet of cigarettes today.

It’s a filthy habit, I know. What’s worse, I haven’t smoked for the best part of 30 years.

And I paid over the odds – ten quid for a packet of fags!
So why did I do it?

Well, actually, they’re not for me, they’re for my children.
The plan is for them to take the cigarettes to school.

Not for a crafty one behind the bike shed.
In fact I doubt whether you could smoke the cigarettes in question, even if you wanted to – which I don’t.

They’re the Gold Flake brand, made by the Bristol-based tobacco manufacturers, WD & HO Wills.

They’re the best part of sixty years old. I bought them in an auction in Jersey where they have a special significance.

Towards the end of the Second World War they were part of a Red Cross consignment carried on board the first ship to dock in Jersey after the end of the Occupation by the Germans.

For the Islanders it was the first heady taste of freedom – in one case at least they were presumably just too good to smoke.

My packet of cigarettes will be a fascinating exhibit for my children’s class to discuss at Show & Tell.

This post is the first of what may become a regular contribution from Mike, formerly permitted to appear here only as Blog Fodder.

The children have started beavers/cubs.

We suggested it, as the venue is just at the back of our house.
We don’t have to take them or fetch them, and we’re anticipating lots of weekend campouts for them, without us.

My first flicker of doubt as to the wisdom of this new activity came after Ben’s first session.

We were chatting to Brown Bear or Tabby Cat or whatever it is the leader calls himself, when he thrust two pieces of paper into my hands.

By way of explanation he said,

“Could you fill these in and bring them back next week please?”

I looked at what was being shoved at me.

Two CRB police check forms.

“Shouldn’t it be you who fills this out?” I asked, hoping he would understand I was making a joke - sort of.

“It’s so you can help out…” he replied, “… on occasion, of course,” he added, noticing the look of horror scuttling uncontrolled across my face.

In the end we didn’t take the forms, as we don’t yet have the necessary local (said in hushed Royston Vasey tones) paperwork to prove our identities.

But however we managed to stave off the inevitable, it would have been nice to have been asked whether or not we’d like to help, on occasion of course.

My second moment of unease came when reading the Cub Scout Promise that Ben has to fill in and sign.

I promise that I will do my best, to do my duty to God and to the queen, to help other people and to keep the Cub Scout law.

I was never a Brownie myself so I was only dimly aware of the militaristic overtones of the Scouting movement. I hadn’t twigged there were also strong religious and patriotic aspects to this camping lark.

I have no quarrel with doing your best and helping other people, but I’m afraid I’ve already been subtly undermining the rest of it.

I was very impressed with his activities last week though: - ironing, sewing and window-cleaning.

I have yet to see any evidence of these new skills at home, but he has a Good Turn Diary to fill out, so perhaps when he gets around to putting pen to paper he will remember the endless fun to be had with an iron and ironing board.

I won’t hold my breath.

Especially as his first query about this diary task was to ask me -

“Can’t I just make things up for it?”