Hotels vs. bed and breakfast

The Merchant's House, Derry

 I can't remember when I last had a touring holiday - i.e. a holiday where you move from place to place.  Usually we book an apartment somewhere and stay put.  But on our recent trip to Ireland we took the car over and travelled around, sleeping in seven different beds over eight nights.  One of the interesting lessons this taught me is the need to shop carefully when booking hotels.

Far and away the best accommodation for us was the elegant Merchant's House, a Derry town house owned by Joan Pyne and her husband.  We had an attractive bedroom at the rear of the first floor, the front room being a stunning sitting-room for guests.  Breakfast was served round a large table in the dining-room below, which gives you the opportunity to mix - briefly - with others staying.  In our case there was an Australian couple, a trio from Bilbao and a silent Frenchman.

I hadn't known what to expect, but had been attracted by the architecture.  The interior was a dream of perfect proportions and beautiful detailing in cornices and ceiling roses.  Joan was a delight and breakfast was copious.  And we slept like tops in the comfortable bed.

Canal Court Hotel, Newry

This was all very different from the soulless monoliths I had booked us into in Newry and Sligo.  In Newry the Canal Court, at a cost of £115, offered a spacious room overlooking a carpark, but the public areas on the ground floor were a nightmare of bad taste and thronging partygoers, increasingly the worse for drink as the night wore on.  The ground floor bar was dominated by a vast screen showing a football match. Call me oldfashioned, but I expect a bit of style in what purports to be a four star hotel.

In Sligo I'd been impressed by the picture of the Clarion Hotel.  I hadn't thought it through: to fill a place that size during the Easter school holidays you need to bring in the families and children.  We had a particularly garrulous tot in the room next door, whose delighted babble could easily be heard through a communicating door.  When the tot fell quiet, its siblings and cousins and friends amused themselves by running up and down the long corridor.  The Clarion Hotel was originally built as a lunatic asylum.  We left before our sanity was threatened.

The basic contrast in all this was between the corporate and the personal.  It's not just a question of cost - the Clarion was reasonable enough.  But if you're offering budget rates in a large hotel it looks as if you'll be employing undertrained staff with little interest in making you feel like a valued customer.  Something that came naturally to Joan Pyne in the Merchant's House.

Antony Mair 

Clarion Hotel, Sligo

The start of Hastings Stanza

JD Bar Bistro, Claremont, Hastings - venue for Hastings Stanza meetings

Stanza groups are offshoots of the Poetry Society, and consist of people in a given area who come together to talk about poetry - whether to workshop their own work, hear readings or talks by poets, or discuss poetry generally.  For almost two years now I've been attending meetings of Brighton Stanza, which has workshops each month, and have found it enormously helpful with my own writing.  One or two people then suggested I might start a Stanza in Hastings, and after a contact with the Poetry Society to try and gauge the extent of interest I took the plunge and organised a meeting a couple of weeks ago.  I'd been tipped off about an available space at JD Bar Bistro, so seven of us congregated there for the inaugural meeting.  I'd suggested we follow the Brighton pattern of workshopping our poems, which everyone seemed to be happy with, and the result was an interesting evening with very varied work.

Hastings isn't Brighton, and it's going to be interesting to see the direction we take as time goes on.  The Brighton Stanza is well established after eight years or so, and attendances, while varying, are usually in the teens - on one occasion there were twenty-three of us, which is rather more than ideal.  There's a good spread of both age and talent, which makes meetings stimulating.  Our little fledgling in Hastings has a long way to go before we have that kind of zing, but I have every hope we'll get there.  After our first gathering I just felt delighted that I'd set the ball rolling.  Meetings are now to take place on the second Wednesday of each month, and I'm already looking forward to May 14.

Antony Mair

Haute cuisine on TV, junk on the motorways

Last week we watched a Masterchef  programme, in which a group of amiable young-ish people produced a series of elaborate dishes judged by experts on grounds of presentation, combinations of flavours and general technique.  I am newly aware of the perils of a split sauce or a cardamom crême anglaise that's not thick enough.

The following day we set off for Holyhead, 375 miles northwest of Hastings.  Our journey involved calls at various service stations for refreshment along the M25, M40 and M6.  Nothing could have better illustrated the gulf between the cooking programmes on the television and the brutal reality of daily eating on the country's motorways.

Franchises to Costa's, Starbuck's, McDonald's and the like result in a variety of processed foods without either taste or originality.  "Welcome Break" announced one of these refuges.  "Welcome to whom?" I wondered, as we ate a burger from a cardboard box - the bun was like a wrung-out flannel, the meat indeterminate (I am hoping it was cow rather than horse), the vegetables tasteless.  The accompanying chips were good.  Cutlery is considered superfluous, or perhaps it's felt that customers don't possess the necessary skills to handle a knife and fork.  If I'd raised the point with the establishment, doubtless there would have been references to "street food" - the growingly fashionable pretext for cutting corners by modelling our eating habits on the third world's poor.

These are seriously depressing places.  Our fellow-customers - a cross-section of the modern British? - were in many cases grotesquely overweight, hunching myopically over the sugar, carbohydrate and emulsifier concoctions on their trays with a weary apathy before waddling out, like so many penguins, to their oversized vehicles.

Perhaps it was always thus: the all-day breakfasts of transport caffs have merely been replaced by a more homogenised version, more slickly marketed.  There was no sign of a freshly made crême anglaise, let alone a sauce out of anything other than a sachet or branded bottle.  Seen from the motorway, Masterchef appears like an encounter with an alien species, heading alarmingly for extinction.

Antony Mair

College reunions - a good thing?

The cloisters, Hall and chapel, Magdalen College, Oxford

To Oxford, last weekend, for a Gaudy at Magdalen.  It's difficult to believe that it's fifty years since I started my degree there.  I'd only been to one Gaudy before, after which I concluded that I'd been right to keep up with the people I had and not more.  That was the best part of twenty years ago, when I was still in the City.  It seemed churlish not to go along with the suggestions of old friends and try again.

I'd been given a room that was a sort of semi-underground burrow, with the luxury of an en suite shower room but a carpet so filthy I wasn't inclined to walk on it in bare feet.  The profusion of cream paint brought back vividly the terrible drabness of so much college life.  Conversation at dinner was uphill work.  The speeches, by the President of the College and a knight of the realm respectively, were only semi-audible, and after straining to catch words of wisdom I concluded it wasn't worth the effort.  "The trouble with men is that as they get old they either die or grow pompous," said a woman I once met.  I'm not sure about the pomposity.  It may be that dull is a more appropriate word.   

An alarming reminder of what I was like as an undergraduate occurred when two men a little younger than me introduced themselves and asked me if I recalled their frequent visits to my rooms for coffee in my third year.  Scarily, I had no recollection of either of them. One said "You were so wonderfully opinionated".  So some things don't change.  

I had no thrilling encounter with anyone I hadn't seen for years and who will be my new best friend.  The most interesting part of the weekend was the light it shed on the tricks of memory.  I had forgotten the misery of much of my time there, when I felt inadequate and depressed by the medieval melancholy of the environment.  I had not realised how much of that time I had blotted out when looking back.  The whole experience was amazingly valuable, and a great privilege.  But I'm glad to have moved on.

One of the best things about the weekend was the poster at Oxford Station that I saw while waiting for my return train.  "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us" it proclaimed.  Then "To know more phone Jeff", with a telephone number and a picture of Jeff at the side.  I am keen to know more about Jeff.  Is he a person or a trade name - an acronym, even, for something like "Jesus Evangelises For Free"?  I have a phone call to Jeff on my To Do list.  Surely he tweets for Jesus?

Antony Mair