“A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her”
W. C. Fields

Now, I feel really guilty. I’ve been buying wine off Tony Jackson, the boss at Lakeland Vintners, for 20 years and he’s explained to me why it’s impossible to make a penny from selling wine. Here’s the maths. If he sells a bottle of vin de table for £3.99 (wholesale), excise duty accounts for £1.69 of that price and VAT a further 67p. That leaves only £1.63 for the planting, tending and picking of the vines; for the vats (oak or stainless steel), the bottling, labelling and shipping. On the assumption that the vineyard and the shipper take a cut how can there be any room for profit for him, especially as I get a bulk discount on every case delivered?

These facts emerge at a do where Tony, with his customary generosity, is supplying the wine for dozens of guests entirely free of charge. Is this generosity calculated to make me feel even more guilty, or is it that because Tony must lose money with every bottle which he sells it’s more cost effective for him to give the stuff away.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week interviewing chefs and believe me there are some pretty rum specimens out there, with some gruesome tales of being driven to the limits of physical and mental endurance in under-staffed and ill-equipped kitchens. It seems that some chefs really do work in a “hells kitchen”.
I wonder how many of the fresh faced youngsters at Kendal College tonight know what awaits them in the real world. They are taking part in a “Hells Kitchen” style competition under the tutelage of Richard Axford and John Crouch in an event generously sponsored by Cumbria Life magazine. As on the TV show the goings on in the kitchen are relayed to the diners via a large TV screen in which we see the young apprentices beavering away in a state of the art kitchen using the finest ingredients. These utterly benign conditions produced, unsurprisingly, superb results. It was good to see their innocent faces beaming with pleasure as they received the plaudits of the diners. I only hope that when I’m interviewing chefs in a few years time I don’t come across any of these same faces with the hollow eyes of the broken young men I’ve been interviewing this week.

The picture shows Richard Eccles, the editor of Cumbria Life, congratulating the winning team.

Whenever I eat in a new place I’m always on the lookout for new ideas. Hotels and restaurants are constantly trying to stay ahead of the game, so change is everywhere- in menus, in decoration and even in crockery and tableware. If an idea is good it will soon find its way up north to one of my hotels. But its amazing how often designers who are trying to make something which is different, which stands out, forget about or ignore the fundamental principal of functionality.
I saw two prime examples of this this weekend. The first was in the new Boundary Hotel, in Shoreditch, designed by Conran. The hotel is in a former factory or warehouse, with large full length windows on every floor. Some of the corner rooms have six of these windows, which looked stunning with white walls and white blinds. I asked the Manager if the blinds were black-out blinds. “No”, she replied, “and this does cause quite a few problems”. I’m not surprised. The purpose of a curtain or blind in a hotel bedroom is to exclude the light and blinds which look good but which leave the customer in full light at four o’clock on a summer’s morning are not fit for purpose. Bad design, Conran.
The second example is the tea strainer pictured here. This ludicrous object has only three drainage holes, so that it takes time to drain and invariably spills tea over the table when it is removed from the cup. One new design which will definitely not be making its way up north.