Staying off the Beaten Track [antikvár]

IntroductionThis book is about inexpensive places at which to stay: well over half charge only L7L11 for bed-and-breakfast. But as much as being about below-average costs it's about above-average service. It isn't usually in the widely advertised and overstaffed big hotels that you get truly cherished, but in the delightful and individual houses I have searched out in remote byways, where real English hospitality still flourishes.It was not in a cheap guest-house that I found five (five!) holes in my sheet; where the ashtray that was full on my arrival was still full two days later; where old food splashes had left a series of stains on the curtain hanging close to my breakfast table; where the vacuum-cleaner stood all day and every day in the main hall; where neither waiter nor head-waiter responded to my requests for butter. On the contrary, it was in one of Yorkshire's 4-star hotels: current price for bed-and-breakfast, around L40.And it was in an even dearer, many-starred hotel in Liverpool that I was allotted a bedroom already occupied by a man; that I had to wait half an hour for the switchboard to put a phone call through to my home in London; that no porter was to be found to carry my case; and that the arguments and clatter in a service-room near my bedroom awakened me each morning at 6 a.m.In one of Brighton's grandest hotels, also about L40, not only was service excruciatingly slow in the dining-room but the waiter's jacket (which clearly hadn't been to the cleaners for ages) brushed into the food when at last it did come. When a kitchen fire caused the evacuation of the premises next morning, it came as little surprise.Staying in a pricey hotel near Colchester I encountered a young Spanish waiter who, on bringing sole to the table with the usual question, 'On ze bone or off ze bone?' looked totally blank when I replied 'On the bone, please.' 'I not know what zis means,' he said. However, I greatly preferred him to the cockroach in my bath, at a prestigious hotel in Cheltenham.It was in royal Berkshire that the staff of a 4-star hotel, nearly L50, provided frayed towels (and no bathmat), failed to produce mustard until my beef was cold (when about a half-pint of it was15