Hotels

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold: Child-friendly, sex-free, nut-heavy – just the hotel for my 40th birthday

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates motorways, and Little Baby (LB) is not welcome at ordinary country house hotels, because he is incontinent. (This does not detract from his charm.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: The rules of wearing a dressing gown

Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume they are alone and start talking very indiscreetly about someone else you know and you have left it too late to alert them to your presence? — Name and address withheld A. Ideally you will have access to earphones and some sort of electronic device and can walk through the carriage dopily, as though looking for a newspaper. Wrench out the headphones theatrically on seeing the talkers. In the absence of headphones, duck your head down, walk backwards to the nearest connecting doors and, when they wheeze open, walk through them with the momentum of someone who has just re-entered the carriage. Q.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A Roald Dahl tea? It reminds me more of Jimmy Savile

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get a picket, a dazzling marketing dream. No, it is called the Scrumdiddlyumptious Afternoon Tea and it is tied, in sugary, monetised chains, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a musical featuring a man dressed as a Fisher-Price toy (and possible diabetic), child torture and obesity, and explicit abuse of small minority workers, which is playing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane nearby. (Or as the blurb says: ‘Every item reflects the wit and wonder of Roald Dahl’s classic tale.’ Wit?

Thursday

Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones: Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army

Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army, with Griff Rhys Jones, is on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday, 7th July. I have spent a week with old, old men, interviewing veterans who served with the West African regiments in Burma in the 1940s. It’s for a television programme about my father’s war. The young men who were shipped off to the Far East are nonagenarians now and, black or white, universally charming and calm: unhurried, unflappable and brimming with patient good humour. At first, I thought that that’s what must happen as you approach your own centenary. But then I realised it might be the other way round. Perhaps this admirable lack of neurosis was what kept them alive. So stop fretting. Get cooler. I fancy another 30 years myself.