I can never remember my star sign, perhaps because I don’t really care enough. For the purposes of this blog, I looked it up and it turns out I am a Scorpio (tomorrow I will have forgotten this piece of information). Apparently, this means,

“You can have a sharp edge, but this isn’t always a negative quality. It gives you an appreciation for authenticity and a strong sense of independence. However, you’re not always as tough as you appear. Once you let people into your life, you’re a bit of a softy”.

This is not a long way off true although I would be interested to meet somebody who doesn’t appreciate authenticity. Anyway, I read the other 11 and they could also all apply to me. I have trouble understanding why anyone would think an oil millionaire from Texas would have the same character traits as a two-year-old in Sub-Saharan Africa just because they share a birthday.

               This brings me to Mystic Meg. Famous people, like all the rest of us are prone to death. Not a week goes by without the sad news of a Hollywood star or beloved singer passing away. Many of them are names we recognise but can’t remember anything they did, while others it comes as a surprise that they didn’t die years ago.

               However, reports of the death of Mystic Meg touched me much more than I expected. I hadn’t really thought about Meg in twenty years and had no idea she wrote for the Sun newspaper until very recently but I was always strangely fascinated by this TV astrologer who interrupted the National Lottery every week throughout the 90s. She was a middle-aged cape wearing woman who held a crystal ball and was surrounded by fake smoke. Her predictions were mad…

               “People who wear flip flops on holiday, like watching The Bill or have ever seen a peacock will be celebrating toooooooo”.

               “People who eat toast cut into triangles, used to play the guitar or recently attended a family occasion will be celebrating tooooooooo”.

               “People who drive cars, live in a house number divisible by 72 or can spell the word halloumi will be celebrating tooooooo”.

               “People who pull Christmas crackers, occasionally stroke dogs or are Yorkshire pudding enthusiasts will be celebrating tooooooo”.

               How did she come up with this stuff? People all over the country were given hope simply because they enjoyed action films or had a relative in the civil service. To prove Meg’s accuracy we were introduced to lottery winners with giant cheques who (as Meg said the previous week) had once been on a train to Wales or had a parent who wore carpet slippers.

Now I wonder if it matters… I suspect deep down everyone knows this stuff is rubbish but if it gives people a welcome distraction or a slice of hope, does it really matter? After all, perhaps “people who have ever ridden a pony, use a funny voice to talk to babies or receive adverts in the post” should be celebrating tooooooo.

RIP MEG (I think she knew tooooooo….)

Following the exam, we all retreated to our hotel with an 86 page handbook we were asked to read before tomorrow’s day two of the training course at head office. Of course, that never happened. I did at least open the handbook, but it was so boring I put it down in just a few seconds and decided upon a nap instead.

When I woke up, I went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. This was all paid for by the company so having my normal evening meal (petrol station sandwiches) was forgotten. What I found was my classmates surrounded by a lot of empty glasses. Considering we had spent all day learning about beer, it was worth nothing that none of them were consuming lagers but had all gone for wine or spirits instead. It seems the tutor’s inspirational words had been discarded.

We swapped stories over a steak dinner, then the waiter came to take a dessert order. I went for a chocolate brownie. My colleague said she wasn’t hungry so would take a rose wine instead. ‘What size’ enquired the waiter, ‘bottle, actually make that two’ came the reply. I wonder if this is what the company had in mind when they agreed to pay for dinner.

Next morning we somehow managed to get back to the office without serious incident and even more fortunately, there were no team building exercises. I would happily never do another team building exercise ever again, the assumption that we all want to get to know each other better always appears misplaced.

Instead, we were straight into the course. I had remembered to bring the handbook so although I had failed to read it, I was doing better than many of my colleagues. The sighing tutor asked who had completed the book as asked. One person raised their hand, the tutor asked them a question about the final section ‘oh sorry, I thought you asked something else’ came the reply. The sighing tutor sighed again.

The topic of the course was the legal requirements affecting pubs. Licencing authorities, health & safety, insurance, operating schedules, child protection and the affects of alcohol on the body (something many of my colleagues were current case studies for). It was as dull as you imagine. The screen was still in the same place as yesterday so the interruptions of the people walking in front with their coffee cups continued although this was a welcome distraction from the tedium of what was actually on the screen.

Lunch was an identical platter from yesterday although this time people had brought their own food, mainly crisps, chocolate bars and free biscuits from the hotel rooms. This meant that there was a lot of food left over but at least there were no piles of egg scraped from sandwiches. It also gave the chance for one colleague to go back to his car to sleep.

The afternoon session was taken up by going through the handbook we were supposed to have completed in the hotel. Later I considered that as the sighing tutor had set aside so much time for this must have meant she knew nobody was going to do the homework. One interesting fact was that a binge drinking session is less than one bottle of wine. At this point my colleague with the two bottles of rose for dessert excused herself and ran to the toilet.

Then came the exam. At least we were aware it was happening this time. The desks were separated and the handbooks removed. We were each given a Mini Bounty bar ‘for luck’, the sighing tutor quickly realising the chance of success was falling by the moment. It was also stressed that we only needed 65% to pass and it was multiple choice. Just as we were about to begin, an invigilator turned up for a surprize visit. At this development, the sighing tutor made her most dramatic sigh of the day so far.

Two weeks later, a letter arrived. I had somehow managed to pass both courses and I have certificates to prove it. I suspect this was due to an admin error at the exam board, but I won’t query it. Instead I put them in a draw with the handbook which I am unlikely to ever look at again, in fact I can’t even remember which draw I put them in.

I notice that they are offering this course again in a couple of weeks, although with a different tutor. Upon investigation the accommodation being offered at the course is now ‘room only’. I wonder why?

Last month a parcel was left outside my door. The name on the package wasn’t one I recognised, and the house number was missing.

I took it into the flat so it was out of the rain hoping that the delivery driver had taken a photo of it by my door and the rightful owner would come and collect it.

Two weeks later… nothing.

Having worked in hotels, returning lost property has been part of my life for a long time. So often with low-cost items (half a bottle of shampoo, dented phone chargers, frayed pyjamas) the owners make a big fuss about and insist on them being returned as soon as possible, paying high charges in the process. Whereas entire suitcases remain unclaimed for years.

I always enjoy the annual reports from the London Underground of people who left a digeridoo, life size stuffed bear or false leg on the tube and never got round to getting it back. People who leave their leg behind are particularly curious to me…

Anyway, back to the parcel. I decided to contact Amazon (who delivered the parcel) to find out what to do with it. This was particularly challenging. They have an automated system meaning anything that didn’t meet one of their pre-determined options was virtually impossible to get information about. Every option I clicked on brought up a series of things related to items I had ordered and not received, however nothing related to things I had received but not ordered.

Eventually I managed to get a message to something pretending to be a person (I think it was still a bot with a human sounding name). They struggled to understand what I was asking. Apparently, it is incredibly rare for people to admit receiving parcels they didn’t ask for….

One of the messages I got in the disjointed conversation informed me they “take security issues extremely seriously” and apologised for “compromising the safety of the household”. The possibility it ‘could’ have been a bomb wasn’t anything I had really considered and escalated the situation considerably. All I wanted to know was what to do with it. If they can find the right address, I have no problem with taking it over, also I have no problem with dropping it back in the post box… JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

Later on that evening I got an email saying that they will contact “the relevant department” but if I have heard nothing within 72 hours the contents of the parcel will be mine to keep or “donate to a charity of your choice” as opposed to a charity of somebody else’s choosing…

This became quite intriguing. A lost parcel from Amazon could contain anything. A quick google search told me the most expensive product on their website was an 1884 Morgan Dollar MS-67 Illinois set (a fancy name for old coin) worth £827,934.52. Just imagine if that would become mine… No more rural pub for me…

Over the next 72 hours, I found myself checking my watch more frequently, even setting an alarm to the minute the deadline would be passed.

The big moment arrived. I had heard nothing. I double checked my phone and email just to make sure then excitedly ripped the parcel open….

This is what it contained.

Maybe my retirement will have to wait….

It is a well-documented phenomenon that there are more job vacancies than people looking for jobs. It seems that every business in the country is hiring and people are being given jobs they are clearly unsuitable for simply because the company is desperate and nobody else applied.

One solution for business owners is to use staff from ‘the agency’. The trouble with this is that they have no idea who will turn up and what skills they will possess. Sometimes the agency staff are highly skilled and are doing temporary work to supplement their income. Other people are doing it for the vastly inflated salaries (perhaps £18 per hour) knowing their performance is unimportant as tomorrow they will be working somewhere else.

The rural pub advertised for a chef for a busy Friday to cover staff illness. The position was accepted by somebody we were assured came with a lot of experience in food. Let’s call him David. The head chef needed David to make pasta and had gathered the ingredients ready for him to get started as soon as he arrived. Unfortunately, he was over an hour late which wasn’t a great start. Things went from bad to worse when it became clear David didn’t know how to make pasta, apparently his experience was working with Indian cuisine. So, a simple recipe was found for him to follow.

The kitchen was busy preparing for the night ahead so it took a while before it was noticed that no pasta has been produced. It turned out that David couldn’t follow the simple recipe either. By now it was 5pm and people would be arriving for dinner very soon. The chef decided the only thing to do was to cheat and just buy ready made pasta from the supermarket and hope nobody noticed. This should have been the end of the matter except David (with his years of experience) didn’t know you had to put water in the pan with the pasta and filled the kitchen with smoke setting off the alarms. It was at this point we learned the truth. David’s food experience was ‘distribution’ meaning he didn’t make food but simply delivered it to customers in his Vauxhall Corsa.

Then there was a waiter. Let’s call her Miriam. Unlike David, Miriam was honest about her lack of experience and arrived on time for her 4pm shift. We decided to give her the easy jobs such as wiping tables, collecting glasses and folding napkins to free up the rest of the team to deal with the whims of the public. Within ten minutes of arriving, Miriam needed to take a phone call, this lasted quarter of an hour. On her return she announced that she had to leave at 7pm as she needed to get back home to Hull on the train. Hull is more than three hours away from the rural pub but at £17 per hour, she can afford the ticket.

Miriam quickly became confused by the sauces. For context, the rural pub buys four-gallon tubs of sauces and then decant them into clear squeezy bottles for use by the customers.

“The labels have come off the bottles, how do I know which sauce is which?” she asked.

I took a deep breath “the ketchup is red and the mayo is white”

“How about mustard?” she interrupted.

“Well, that is yellow”. Luckily I work with the general public so am used to a certain level of stupid questions. Then came the moment I realised that Miriam wasn’t going to work out.

“What if somebody wants brown sauce?”

There is always a mythical feel to ‘head office’, the generic group of people who rule over every aspect of our working lives. Any mention that ‘head office’ are coming to visit leads to flurries of telephone calls, panicked messages and stressed duty managers. We are asked to hide away anything they won’t like, special lunches will need preparing and car parking spaces are blocked off in their honour.

Of course, the reality is either a) they are here for a meeting with the manager, leaving straight after so none of us actually see them or b) they are here for a free lunch (and free drink) so don’t care what any of us are doing. The risk of them finding any fault is remarkably low. Yet still we flap.

However, there is a whole new level of panic associated with having to go to head office. We imagine this is a magical Disneyland-style paradise but of course it is a dreary suburban office block with access to a major road and a large car park.

I was summoned to the head office of the rural pub when it was decided I should be enrolled on a two day ‘alcohol service’ course. Let me be honest, it was not a surprise that it was noticed I needed training. I couldn’t explain the difference between lager and ale, assumed cask and keg were two words for the same thing and my pint pulling was wildly varied (to the point my colleagues used to correct them without asking). However, two days? Head office?

My class mates were from a variety of locations around the country and (like me) seemed completely baffled by relatively simple things. The day started with a game of two facts and a lie where each person says three things about themselves and the rest of us guess which are correct. Many people were totally hopeless at this and said things like “I used to live in Massingham” a statement so specific/boring, that nobody knew/cared.

The classroom was essentially a large foyer between the call centre and staff canteen meaning there was a constant stream of people walking in front of the screen with cups of tea. It was also freezing cold.

We were taught beer and food pairings. My classmates struggled with this “do you eat the skin on the brie?”, “I don’t really like beer, do you have any blackcurrant squash?” and “can I drink their leftover pints?” (It was 9:30am).

Next came changing a barrel. We all got to have a go at this, one at a time, which involved standing outside in the cold for ages. Most people did fairly well, except me who was too slow and all the beer poured onto the ground as I fumbled around trying to plug the hole. Later, I spotted a caretaker with a hose grumpily clearing it up while muttering to himself. I don’t think I will get a Christmas card from him this year.

By then it was lunchtime. Rather than having us in the canteen with the ‘great and the good’ we had food brought in. This took the form of M & S sandwich platters, pork pies and plain crisps. I was very happy with this but my colleagues were less sure, suspiciously prodding the pork pies and scraping the egg out of sandwiches just eating the bread. Again, an enquiry was made about the leftover pints, the tutor had to explain they will all be warm and flat. My colleague looked crestfallen.

Then came a bombshell. We would be sitting an exam at the end of the day. Many of us had not realised that would be happening. We would be required to put our notes away (that didn’t really bother me as I hadn’t thought to make any in the first place). An intensive hour of preparation came where a variety of policies and laws were presented in a quickfire, scattergun technique as we all scrambled around trying to copy facts from the PowerPoint screen (that people were still walking in front of with their coffees).

As it happened the exam was multiple choice and we only needed 70%. We were all separated, and the tutor walked up and down with her heels clicking on the floor, sighing loudly at some of our answering. Sadly “can you eat the skin on a brie” wasn’t one of the questions.

I was the last to finish, I simply had no idea about 14 of the questions. So I just ticked A then B then C then D all the way down the page while the tutor continued the loud sighing.

That concluded day one.

To be continued…

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream that my school was underwater and filled with fish. We had to swim between classrooms past coral reefs and friendly sharks. A dream dictionary says this meant I had repressed worry. Why don’t dream dictionaries ever say life is going well and there is nothing to worry about?

Many adults say they don’t remember their recent dreams, but I remember mine every night, not because they are terrifying or exciting but because they are always so tedious. I don’t know what it says about me, perhaps I lack imagination, but I have been afflicted by dull dreams for most of my adult life. Recent examples include;

• Trying to load a new printer cartridge
• Finding the right change in a shop
• A biro running out
• Choosing a toilet cleaner in the supermarket
• Replacing the batteries in a remote control

Then when I do wake up, I wake up annoyed that, once again, my brain has failed to be more creative. I take it as a personal failing. I read that some people wake up angry, some wake up crying, some wake up laughing. I just wake up bored. I have found that Andrew Lloyd Webber is wrong. Any dream won’t do.

I frequently wake up in the night and find it tough to get back to sleep so I need to find something to occupy my brain, so it doesn’t start whirring on its own. I can check my emails once again (though, of course, nobody has emailed in the last 20 minutes, because it is 4:30am). It is because of this I discovered the wonders of overnight speech radio.

               On my wireless, pre-set one is 5Live. They have very long features overnight often including ‘What is your favourite song’ is one they seem to do almost every week complete with a very long discussion about the handful of inevitably obscure suggestions given.

                So I get up, turn off a dripping tap, open a window and go back to bed. It is at this point I am in danger of going over a conversation I had that went badly twenty years ago so perhaps I will try listening to LBC. The people who ring into LBC in the middle of the night are a very specific group of people. They very rarely seem to have a good grasp of the subject yet will never admit defeat when facts are presented and resort to shouting instead. The topic last night was disability inclusion which I imagined people would be in favour of, but no, the shouty people were back and bellowing. ‘Disabled people are so slow, they should move out of the way so the rest of us can move quicker’ one man yelled. I wonder if they sit by the phone trying to find things to be angry about, take it as a challenge. Perhaps they practise.

               All this shouting does not make me sleepy. I am up again, closing the window, refilling the water glass and I try switching to Talk Radio. Very few people ever call (particularly in the middle of the night) so the hapless host is forced to speak for 20 mins at a time uninterrupted, desperately hoping for a commercial break or a fire alarm. Saturday morning was a treat. A lady I hadn’t heard before was trying to get people to call in by asking ‘what is a corned beef hash?’ Clearly, she hadn’t got access to Google. She resorted to having a long conversation with ‘producer Olly’ but we couldn’t hear him, only her responses. Later, she asked us to ‘text in, if you have any thoughts about anything at all’ and most brilliantly ‘now we are joined by Julie from Darlington, what time is it there?’ Only to discover Julie wasn’t there and had actually just sent an email.

By this point the sun is rising, the dawn chorus has begun and my brain has given up with its spinning and I am falling asleep, ready to repeat the whole process and begin dreaming about fitting a new ironing board cover safe in the knowledge that I know about corned beef hash.

In the spring of 2019, I wrote a blog about the stupidness of secret shoppers. In the following 30 months, I have had several more encounters…

               It seems the number of secret shoppers that operate has risen substantially. Coca Cola sends out their own inspectors. They want to check their products are being served correctly with the proper glasses and at the proper temperatures. Often the Coca Cola people will visit every pub in the town on the same morning, so we all know they are coming. They are so obvious.

1. They ask for a coke and a gin (even though they are on their own and it’s 10:30am)
2. The gin order will be with Schweppes tonic – no regular customer ever wants this
3. They will want lemon in the coke – no regular customer ever wants this either
4. A receipt will be requested (most people don’t ask bartenders for receipts for low-cost items)

Honestly, any bar tender that can’t spot these signs (particularly as they only seem to visit Mon-Fri, 9-5 when the pubs are quiet) deserves to fail.

               Secret shoppers have to follow a number of procedures. If their check lists haven’t been updated in a while, red flags are raised quickly. In the hotels, phoning for a quote (but not actually booking) is an obvious one. Normal guests will look this information up on the website. Detailed questions about Christmas in April will see the manager quickly notified.

Asking a number of very specific questions about allergies (despite them being clearly explained on the menus) is another sign. According to the secret shopper rules, front of house staff have to go to the kitchen and ask the chef about these questions even though they already know the answers – it is clearly explained on the menu. So, the waiter will take this opportunity for a cigarette break.

Due to decreasing budgets, secret shoppers now often only visit for a couple of hours, rather than a weekend break. Their policy dictates they need to sit in the main restaurant for lunch, despite the fact they will be the only person in there (everyone else eats in the lounges). So, we turn the lights on just for them. We are not allowed to leave them on their own, even though they are the only person in the room, we have to assign somebody to stay with them. It will need to be somebody local as another question they are duty bound to ask is about local attractions. We recommend lovely local walks even though it is cold and raining. By this point, they know, that we know, that they are a secret shopper. Yet if we mention secret shoppers, the inspection is cancelled and the whole thing will have to be repeated.

The secret shopper rules are oddly inflexible. “Roaring fires” need to be in evidence even in the height of summer. I know of a colleague who failed the test of checking out a secret shopper guest within the five-minute deadline because the fire bell was sounding, and the hotel was being evacuated.

Yet, I have never met a manager who is that bothered about these inspections. Every guest we have leaves reviews so why should the opinions of fake guests matter any more than the opinions of real guests? The answer is, they don’t. Perhaps we are reaching a point where things are hard enough for the hospitality sector without needing to worry about the opinions of people eating for free.

Or maybe, we will keep that one bottle of Schweppes tonic on standby….

               The supermarket meal deal has kept me alive for many years now. I like the reliability of a sandwich cut into triangles, a drink and some kind of treat all for a bargain price. The sandwiches are all more fancy than I could be bothered making for myself. For the drink I get something that claims to have lots of vitamins, that way I don’t have to think about it for the rest of the day. I once heard that you only need an apple a month to prevent scurvy, that seems a realistic target. The snack treat goes into my bag before being forgotten. Then about twice a month, I find about five squashed biscuits, flapjacks or cake bars in there which is very exciting.

               Then I brake a long standing social rule, don’t eat on the street. I can never wait until I get home to tuck into my supermarket sandwich and always eat it while walking, in a rare act of successful multi-tasking. The packaging then goes into a public bin meaning I don’t have to take my own rubbish out so often (with the exception of the snacks I forgot about).

               To keep it interesting, I use different supermarkets and on my way to the chiller cabinets, I stop to look at the front covers of the newspapers and magazines. The magazines that catch my attention are generally either the celebrity gossip ones, which for some reason always focus on daytime TV presenters rather than A list movie stars. I find the most reliable way to decode these headlines is, if the headline ends with a question, the answer will be no.

               The other type of magazine cover that I enjoy are the ‘real life story’ ones. That’s Life magazine is my favourite “I jailed my daughter on her wedding day”, “my evil pal swapped her baby for a doll” or “my bum sent tots flying”. I am not sure the people involved in any of these stories would have said ‘oh well, that’s life’ making it an inaccurately named publication but it is a lot of fun to read the covers.

               Back to the chiller cabinets and a new game I have discovered, choosing the most expensive items included in the deal to try and save more than I spend. If the meal deal is £3.50, can I find £7 worth of items? Bottled smoothies, fancy crisps and premium sandwiches (particularly Christmas sandwiches) are great here and the pride I feel at finding a bargain is great.

Yes, of course, it would be cheaper to make my own sandwiches and on rainy days I do just that. But by eating at home, I would miss out on a lovely country walk and finding out about the tots who were sent flying by a bum.