Shop to Let

More than one in 10 town and city centre shops across the UK were vacant at the end of May, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has said.

Its study found the average vacancy rate was 11.2%, rising to 17.1% in Northern Ireland, the worst affected nation or region.

Wales was next, with a rate of 13.4%, with the north of England on 13.1%.

Lolipops all free today !

Sometimes i think i am a bit like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! well thats what Mrs Hotel calls me, but its that time of year when we and lots of other hotels get inundated with children, now dont get me wrong if they are well behaved i dont mind them, but sadly theese days most of them are not!.

We have a right little Brat in at the moment that insists on ordering a full breakfast then sits there playing with it for an hour and never eats any of it thats after its had about 3 different cerials that they have spat out and thrown all over the table (new linen every day) and surrounding area, then Mum will say can you take these bowls and plates away i dont think Tamara is that hungry today (WELL YOU SOULDNT HAVE LET HER BLOODY WELL HAVE AYTHING IN THE FIRST PLACE), packets of Jam Honey Marmalade sauce all opened played with then discarded without a care, and the parents say nothing after all they have a right to it, as its been paid for! yeah half bleedin price cos when you rang and booked you would not pay full price for little Tamara cos she is only little and no trouble or little Nathan who is 6 feet 6 inches tall but only 11.


It breaks my heart to see the food that is wasted and just thrown out when there are so many in the world who have nothing, then every week i will buy more expensive items knowing that i have just binned 30% off waht i got last week

You see the trouble is half the time its not the kids its the parents/Grandparents that let them get away with it the kids have taken charge in lots of cases.
In my day my parents told me what when and for how long we would eat, we never left the table unless we asked or were told to.

We always cleaned up any mess (SO WE NEVER MADE ANY) and we NEVER wasted food, it was always so hard to come by in the first place.

And this is maybe the trouble today there is no respect for anyone or anything in lots of cases the kids today have everything they want food, clothes, money, holidays, games,toys. ETC ETC dont get me wrong my kids had all that too and so i am just as bad, but when we took them away or for meals etc they were always well behaved and only had what they could eat or drink.

Roll on September

How do they inspect a hotel

As a hotel guest you might be interested in how a hotel is inspected. Personally I find the whole thing very depressing, as the average inspector is not concerned with whether a hotel is a nice place to stay, but are usually solely concerned with the minutiae of form filling - a growth industry in modern Britain


Being British, we do not attempt to grade hotels as good, mediocre or bad. Instead we have a star system that has nothing to do with niceness, and is based entirely on the services that the hotel offers.They go round and tick off things like mirrors, dressing tables, bedside lights, but are not concerned about the overall effect of is it a nice place to stay - bear that in mind next time you read a hotel guide book.

So the only difference between a 4 star and an identical 3 star hotel may be whether there is a night porter or not. Even with the "quality" awards such as "commended" the difference between a hotel with an award and one without may be whether bottles of mineral water are put in the hotel rooms or not (an inspector told me that).

In other words, the system has been designed to be entirely objective - everything checked off against a list. Nothing subjective is allowed, so they end up not really caring whether the hotel is a haven or hell.

To inspect a hotel, the inspector reserves a room anonymously. Arrives, stays as a "normal" customer, pays the bill and at that stage with a theatrical flourish produces their card - a bit like Clark Kent turning into Superman - announcing them a "John Jones, Quality Assurance Assessor, I jest not, Quality Assurance Assessor is what the Tourist Board call their inspectors. It is difficult to take such bureaucratic semantics seriously!

The inspector then spends the entire morning inspecting, filling up forms and telling us the shortcomings of our hotel according to their check list. The joys of running ones own business .


Some inspections are pedantic to a degree that would make a sergeant major proud. Again nothing to do with quality, everything to do with detail. A couple of examples from a recent inspection shows this

Bathrobes - we do not "have" to supply bathrobes in the bedrooms, but we do. The inspector did not like us putting them in the wardrobe, as they took space in the wardrobe. I pointed out that if we did not supply guests with bathrobes then the problem would not have arisen - they would indeed have been happier if we had not given guests bathrobes, as they were not part of their form filling scheme. So remove the bathrobes at once to make us a better hotel

Wardrobes- we have given a lot of thought to how best to allocate space in the bedrooms, in order to make the rooms as pleasant as possible. An inspector thought that we should had larger wardrobes. On my pointing out that it would make the rooms smaller, that did not enter their calculations - perish the thought that the guest should have a nice room - better that they should have a wardrobe and a bed and no space, which was the situation that we inherited in the hotel. Order absurdly large, cheap wardrobes at once to make us a better hotel

I have to physically produce a copy of the fire certificate (even though it would be a criminal offence for me to run the hotel without one, and they saw it last year) and a copy of my public liability insurance (ditto, I have to have it). For reasons best known to themselves they have me ferreting through filing systems to find these blessed pieces of papers - more time gone.

Probably the best example of the futility of it is when I had to point out to an inspector that she had found more to criticise in our superior rooms than in our standard rooms. I know which I would choose to stay in, and I suspect she would have chosen the superior rooms too. But their system was unable to take into account decor and furnishing, instead focusing on a series of points which, if I had followed, would have ended up with grottier rooms, but ones which matched their specifications. Unfortunately they seem hell bent on driving standards downwards.

Another great one is the "multi-lingual fire notice" in the bedrooms. For reasons best known to themselves the inspecting bodies have decided that all hotels that apply for stars in Britain must have multi-lingual fire notices. However there is no requirement regarding number of languages - "I think one extra language will do" said an inspector. Nor is there any guidance on which language(s), why have French and not German, Dutch and not Italian, how about Swedish, Portugese, Serbo-Croat, Hindi, Xhosa, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Swaheli or Greek. The European Union has upwards of fifteen official languages, why not insist on all of them on the bedroom fire notice. What is the point at chosing one at random? Bureaucracy is determined to drive out good hotel keeping. Lets put up more notices and make our hotels really grotty.

The result is that new hotels are built to the MINIMUM standard required to achieved the required grading. The large hotel groups that dominate the hotel industry in Britain must love the hotel inspectors, as the groups can maximise their profits and minimise what they supply to the guests by doing what the inspectors want. Only a country like Britain could have ended up with this absurd anomaly
And the daftest thing of all with hotel inspectors? They are not "normal". Our average guests come in pairs, hotel inspectors come in ones. Our average guests come for several nights, the hotel inspector comes for one night. Our average guests comes to enjoy themselves, hotel inspectors come to criticise. Still they are so abnormal that most hotels can spot them a mile off.

TAX TAX TAX. TAXI FOR ME!!!

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer ...

And the bill for all ten comes to £100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay £1.
The sixth would pay £3.
The seventh would pay £7.
The eighth would pay £12.
The ninth would pay £18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curved ball ...

'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by £20.' Drinks for the ten now cost just £80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected.
They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid £2 instead of £3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay £5 instead of £7(28%savings).
The eighth now paid £9 instead of £12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid £14 instead of £18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid £49 instead of £59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the Pub, the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a pound out of the £20,' declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he got £10!'

'Yes, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man.
'I only saved a pound, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I did'

'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man.
'Why should he get £10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison.
'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible

Ham Bone

Went into the Ham Bone new cafe for lunch the other day, FAB had one of the pork pies with a lovely salad some onion chutney and a nice glass of rose'wine Smashing.

It is nice to see someone doing well and doing something different, the town needs a few more upmarket Bars cafes and restaurants instead of the same old boring 70s and 80s menus.