XVI. Read a newspaper story by Michael Bywater describing recent trends in hotel industry in Britain. Use a dictionary if necessary.

The guests are sad and desolate. The owner is a sociopath¹. Welcome back to the great British ho­tel.

"Ask for a room and you will be greeted with a resentful glare as if you had wandered in, blind drank and smeared in anchovies..."

Grandpa Price (known as Grandpa Beans), after a life-time in steel, bought a hotel in Bournemouth. Pin money for their retirement plus something to keep his Eth occupied — that was the idea. Eth came from a big family, had a big family of her own, got used to cooking for lots of people, making sure all was as it should be. Then everything empties out. The hotel was a consolation prize, and

very nice too. Big house, secluded, rhododendrons and fishpond. And Bournemouth itself, of course: pines, cliffs, chines, and perpetual summer after the steel-grey winter of Newport. So Eth cooked and bustled about and Grandpa Beans did-it-himself, his speciality being signs, the true love of the British hoteliers.

He had to be stopped after a bit, when he was found sneaking into the house with a sign saying "Please Do Not Wind This Clock";,otherwise who knows where it would have ended. Given a free hand, it wouldn't have been long before the bathroom signs started.

"Please Do Not Leave Hair in Plughole";.

"Baths Must Be Booked 3 (Three) Days in Advance. The Management";.

"Do Not Put Various Objects Down The WC";.

You know the sort of thing. Things being disapproved of or forbidden, not because they are unreasonable, immoral, dangerous or nasty, but just because there are signs avail­able, forbidding them.

Grandpa Beans was stopped in time, but he was an exception. A recent "Which?";report shows that, in the world of hotels, we are still the poor man of Europe. Most British hoteliers practice a grim mixture of xenophobia² [,zenou’fəubiə], contempt, parsimony and ill-temper almost unknown in the rest of the world. These characteristics ran across the whole range. From the vile horrors of the Executive Luxury Hotel to the grumpy, nylon-sheeted В & В, the visitor may be sure he is hated, his only purpose to be parted from his money as quickly as possible.

At least with the lower-grade British Hotel, the hatred and contempt are nakedly in view. Ask for a room and you will be greeted with a harsh resentful glare as if you had wandered in, blind drank and smeared all over in anchovies, while anything which cannot actually be forbidden, will h slammed down or indicated with a sign and a finger.

Move up the scale, and the expression of hatred and disgust is a little less overt, but still quite clear. Thin sheets overstrained mattresses, ice-cold rooms where the heating has been left off to save money. Phone calls are charged at punitive rates; a chill, breath-misting desolation in the corridors.

The language of the staff is honed by industrial psycholo­gists to give an impression of welcome, but it is frosty and impersonal. All the brochures occupy a special linguistic register found nowhere else and illustrated with pictures of ostensible business-couples groomed to near-extinction and obviously in the run from their spouses.

The British hotel caters for the desolate, and preys like a sociopath on their desolation.³

The British hotel is the place where advertisements for contact magazines are composed or replied to, where the Yellow Paged fall open at the section marked 'Sauna & Massage', where visions of luxury — the breakfast, the room service, Harry's Bar (or whatever) are offered and then disappointed, like the rude awakening at the end of a dream of beauty. •

The incompetence, the grudges, the snobbery, bossiness— these are essentially British characteristics, nestling under the umbrella of affronted disapproval that is our national, moral position. For a nation which has such a position, it's a miracle that we have any hotels at all, travellers aren't simply rounded up and clubbed over the head and shoved into vans to be driven back home and put to bed with their hands outside the sheets. The hospitality industry goes as much against the grain here as porkbutchery in Tel-Aviv, the difference being that we have ^l do it and they don't.

As a correspondent of mine who teaches, poor thing, at a hotel management school puts it: "I do wish we were allowed to teach them some manners. All they learn is management, and frankly, they manage rather too well as it is. Then again, I am prejudiced; I suffer from a dislike of hotel managers. Their off-putting attitude is mirrored in their peculiar gait, a fluid mixture of prance, trample and mince."⁴

There you have it: the components of British hotel-keeping: Prance, trample and mince. I suppose you think you're special. It's All Right For Some!

Sorry, we're closed. Sorry, it's the rules. Sorry, no change. I've only one pair of hands. Sorry, it's off. Sorry, kitchen's closed.

From Worthing to the Wirral, from Cardiff to Carlisle, the story's the same. It's the old: "Give us the money, now piss off."⁵

(adapted from "The Observer")

NOTES:

1. a sociopath a person who has problems in socialising with people; социопат

2. xenophobia ксенофобия; неприязненное отношение к иностранцам;

[,zenou’fəubiə]