When I was a kid, no matter how much my parents worked or no matter how little they worked we always managed a family holiday. Usually these were camping trips, at first by tent, later with a trailer until the trailer was sold as part of the financing for our European vacation in 1973. Before then, it was everything from Yellowstone National Park to see “Old Faithful” to Disneyland where us three little boys were decked out in matching navy blue t-shirts with red trim (why do parents do that to kids – is it so they can laugh at the pictures later?) and trips to meet cousins, aunts and uncles along the majestic, sandy beaches of the Oregon coast.
From holidays as a kid to moving to Norway as a not-quite-adult-yet 18-year-old, I’d learned to love travel as the adventure and education it can be.
In my leaner years as a student, living on less than the minimum existence level, there wasn’t a lot of money for travel. In the fall of 1983, I dipped into my summer job savings and bought an unspecified charter from Trondheim to London.
“Unspecified” meant that you were doubled up with someone else from the same flight and stayed in a hotel of the company’s choosing for a very low price. (Thus the headline, less than $200, flight and hotel included.)
There were alluring stories of people who went unspecified and spent the week in luxurious 4 or 5-star hotels.
Assuming every hotel was given a star for participation, I spent my week in a 1-star hotel. The bathroom was down the hall in one direction and the shower was down the hall in the other.
Fortunately, the guy I was to share with, who seemed nice and normal compared to many in the eclectic gaggle of folks on the “unspecified” group bus, had a girlfriend in London. I had a room to myself.
Even better, the hotel was attached to a bar and the bar had a very good bartender.
Like most charter hotels at the time, it was in Bayswater. I could easily walk to almost everything a regular tourist would want to see. Entrance to most museums was free too, so if it rained, I could always pretend to be pretentious and wander the halls of someplace that was full of old paintings and new sculptures or vice versa.
I didn’t spend any time in museums. The sun shone almost every day. I walked around. A lot. If I had paid better attention to the street names and all the famous sites and buildings I wandered past, I probably could have qualified to take “The Knowledge” and become a London taxi driver when my week came to an end.
The streets were teeming with tourists wearing thigh-length white t-shirts with large lettering claiming “Frankie Says Relax”. If you walked behind the Frankie fans, the back of the t-shirt would advise “Don’t do it”.
My meals were consumed in pubs. I ate and listened to conversations rather than engage in them. The Police sang “Every Breath You Take” at least once during each meal and more often than not, the Eurythmics would tell me what “Sweet Dreams” were made of too.
In the eighties, the gastropub hadn’t been invented. Pub lunches were bangers and mash, or fish and soggy chips with a side of mushy peas. Emphasis on the mush.
Pub talk was all politics and prices. Maggie Thatcher was a relatively new prime minister, Northern Ireland was still in the throes of The Troubles, and the price of a pint had climbed to a pound in many pubs. Pint prices seemed to bother people the most.
I squandered a few pence on The Tube and recall standing on the platform wondering if could become a driver of the underground trains that rattled through the tunnels beneath the city, while their passengers stood half-hunched over in the carriages designed for people shorter than 5’1”. I guess that was the average height of an Englishman at the time they were built. I thought it would be fascinating to sit at the controls of a snake-like metal tube that screeched along metal tracks on metal wheels. Would a Psychology student be a good candidate for train driver?
Back at the hotel, I would pretend to be a world traveller who treated himself to a daily nightcap in the bar. That’s a habit my wife and I have kept every night on every trip. Hotel bars are underrated and any hotel that doesn’t have a lounge and a good bartender should have their stars taken away from them.
Someone, probably someone in an old novel, had told me that in England you don’t tip the bartender, you offer him a drink instead. The landlord in the bar that was attached to the hotel said yes to anyone who said “and one for you, Guv’nor” when they ordered a drink.
On the second evening of my visit, I returned to the hotel just after 9. The bartender was struggling to keep the “Guv’nor” on his feet. None of the other customers seemed to notice. Many were in the same state as the landlord. I asked the bartender if he needed a hand. It was a stupid question, but he politely replied that he would be grateful. We propped up a shoulder each and carried the boss off the premises like an wounded footballer gets carried off the pitch. Even those with self-inflicted injuries. The landlord was a thin, smallish man who lived in a flat directly above the bar. It was a simple task and one that the bartender completed alone most evenings.
As we descended the stairs back to the unattended bar, the barman said, “You’re not Norwegian are you?” He knew I had arrived with a Norwegian charter group. I thought it was my accent that tipped him off. “No, it ain’t that. It’s your shoes.”
I was confused. My shoes were from Norway.
“Norwegians never polish their shoes,” he said. “Yours have been polished. I noticed as soon as you came in yesterday.”
He taught me a lesson about observation that would help me later in my career. Shoes do tell you quite a bit about people. Ever since that evening, shoes are one of the things I notice. He poured me a pint on the house and thanked me for helping with the landlord.
After that evening, I returned to the bar every night after wandering the streets of London. Some of the other people from my flight did the same. Or maybe they just never left the hotel but spent their week drinking in the bar. I don’t know. They were always there.
One guy I never saw sober, or even close to sober, during the entire week said he worked on oil rigs in the North Sea and made lots of money. It was three weeks on the rig, three weeks off. When he was off, he travelled and drank. He was usually in control of himself but on the last night in London, he wasn’t. He was suddenly loud and depressed at the same time. When he stumbled back from a trip to the loo his belt wasn’t buckled, nor was his fly zipped. The bartender suggested he should perhaps leave the bar and get some sleep. Along with forgetting to buckle his belt or zip his fly, it seemed the rig worked also forgot to bring his capability to speak English back from the loo. He complained loudly in Norwegian.
I went over to help my friend the bartender with translation if it became necessary.
When he saw me, the oil worker yelled: “I know you!”
His smile was missing a tooth, but it was genuine.
“Tell the bartender, if he doesn’t throw me out, I’ll buy everyone in the bar a drink.”
Since most of the patrons were Norwegians, they started to clap.
The bartender wondered what the applause was for.
I explained and, once he was certain the drinks would be paid for, he started pouring them. My flight friend swayed like a thin tree in a hurricane as he struggled to pull his wallet from his pocket. When it finally emerged, he looked at me and said:
“Here, you take care of this. I’m too drunk to know what I’m doing.”
With that, he handed me the wallet. It contained more cash than I’d ever seen. When everyone had received their drink of choice, I paid the bartender and returned the wallet to the pocket of the now-sleeping guest.
The bartender poured me an extra nightcap and said I should consider a career in hospitality. He was both a keen observer and, considering the career I began a few years later, a clairvoyant.
Bright and early the next morning it was departure time.
Amazingly, the drunk man from the bar was dressed, chipper and ready to go before most people as we assembled on the sidewalk to wait for the airport bus.
Moments before it was time to leave a black cab pulled up. In the back seat, a woman and a man were embraced in a long, passionate, goodbye kiss.
The bus driver honked his horn signalling imminent departure. The woman extracted herself from the embrace, exited the cab and started shuffling through her handbag. In full view of the man she had spent the week with, she pulled out a wedding ring, slipped it on her finger, waved goodbye to her one-week stand and boarded the bus. As his heart shattered in front of the bus full of onlookers the only relief available to her man of the week was knowing that we were all strangers from a foreign land and who, like her, he would never see again.
My week in London taught me several lessons. I already mentioned that shoes often tell stories about people. I learned how a good hotel bar, and perhaps especially a good hotel bartender, can make or break a hotel experience. Sitting in bars, pubs, and restaurants, listening to conversations can teach you everything you need to know about the state of a country in less time than it takes to eat lunch.
Times, and prices, have changed since the time I visited London as a lonely, almost-broke, single student longing to hear his native tongue, but let me sign off with a few final words of advice.
If you’re planning a trip to London, polish your shoes. Keep your trousers zipped up, keep your wallet to yourself and, if you’re married, keep your ring on.
Stay safe, Always Care
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If you’re in hospitality, read our book, Spin the Bottle Service. A local server told us it should be required reading for everyone who works in a restaurant or hotel. In the chapter “Children are also customers” you can read the full Agadhoe Heights story. You can also read about why our memories of the server who wouldn’t serve 18-year-old Vibe a glass of wine are better than the memory of the server who did pour a glass to our underage (in the US) daughter.
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