A meringue (or am I right)

The title of this post will only make sense to Glaswegians. I’ve been trying Italian meringue for no other reason than I had some egg whites left over and the recipe book says it’s complicated. You start with egg white of course…

Whipped into a frenzy

but instead of adding sugar you add boiling sugar syrup…

Bubble bubble

and beat it like crazy. The recipe warns not to let the sugar syrup touch the wires of the whisk which you’ll appreciate is tricky with a Kenwood. I’m not sure it was mixed enough but here’s the result.

Whiter than white

The advantage of this kind of meringue over meringue suisse is that it is much more stable and can be kept for longer before being used. Hardly a major consideration for a domestic cook I guess. The downside apparently is that it has a slightly chalky texture. The third type of meringue is meringue cuite which involves cooking the mixture in a bain-marie.
Apologies for the lack of posts. Nothing much to write about recently. However, stay tuned for pictures of Frances the Frog’s second birthday later this month!

History

Now this is going to confuse you no matter how I try to explain it. The following picture is of part of Room 1 which is going to become our living area…

Room 1a

It’s an odd layout – coming into the room off the main stair you go up a stair to this room (call it 1a) and down a stair to the other part of the room (1b). This is one of the oldest parts of the building and architects who have been in here have pointed out a few interesting features…

end of the building?

I don’t know if you can see, but there are some dressed stones embedded in the wall to the right of the door. I’d thought that the folk who built the place had simply re-used some stones from another building, but apparently not…

If stones could talk this would be a noisy place to live

Sorry about all these red cables getting in the way – blame the fire alarm engineers. Anyway, it seems that these faced stones were originally on the outside of the building and it was extended outwards towards the High Street. There are masons’ marks on some of the stones but I don’t think you can see them here. Meanwhile…

looking out or looking in?

in the wall dividing the two rooms there is a window. Again, I’d assumed that this was the outside of the building, but if the theory about the crowsteps being the front is correct then this was the inside of the room… but what an odd room…

A narrow room

If you look closely you can see a line in the stonework where the building originally ended – it’s since been extended back the way. So originally this was a tall skinny building with crowsteps at the front. There are rumours of part of the building having originally been a tower, but if it was here then it wasn’t a very high one. In the end it’s mostly guesswork, but I thought I’d show some pictures before it gets covered up again when we start upgrading these rooms.

Sorry!

Apologies to folk who check for new posts regularly for the lack of news recently. It’s true that August was quite busy but really there’s not a lot to write about at the moment. Stay tuned however for news of the next phase of the restoration project which will provide more rooms and better facilities for us.

Confused

{Ring Ring}
“Good evening Spread Eagle Hotel, John speaking. How can I help?”
“Hello, do you have a double room available for tonight
[Checks book] “Yes, we do”
Oh good. We are just round the corner, we will be with you soon
[Waits]
{Ring Ring}
Hello, I called a moment ago – does the room have a bathroom?”
“Yes, it does”
Ah good
[Waits]
[waits]
25 minutes pass
{Ring Ring}
Hello we are having a little trouble finding you. We have walked past number 20 but it doesn’t look like a hotel
“Yes, we are at number 20. It’s white, floodlit and has “Hotel” written on the front. (I didn’t say that bit, just thought it) Are you sure you are on the High Street?”
Yes we are on the High Street. We are just up from Fountain Court…
[Scratches head - not sure where Fountain Court is in Jed - this doesn't sound quite right]
“You’re absolutely sure you are on the High Street?”
Yes, yes, Royal Mile near number 24
“Er, you are in Edinburgh?”
(puzzled) Yes, of course

… and of course we aren’t. The Royal Mile in Edinburgh is also known as the High Street and perhaps they hadn’t noticed that Jedburgh and Edinburgh weren’t the same thing (they were Dutch or German I think). Not to worry – two more folk showed up half an hour ago looking for a double, all seven guests and two chance guests had dinner and hopefully our bewildered tourists found a place to stay.

Closing down

There’s a lovely little deli at the square in Jed and on Sunday there won’t be any more; it’s closing down. Deborah the lady who runs it is going to university and hubby Philip is back to selling insurance. So for the second time since we’ve been in Jed it’ll be just another empty shop.
This is a great pity and not just because we get our cheeses there. If people drive into town and see a chocolate shop, a deli, a butcher, baker and candlestick maker they may decide to stop for a while. If they see a load of closed shops they’ll drive off again and who can blame them?

Yet more technology

So we had a machine for processing credit card payments. It was old and slow but it worked. But the display was very faint and I phoned to see if there was some way to make it clearer.

No there wasn’t. We had to get a new one.

So we got a new one and it lasted about two weeks and then broke down.

Last Thursday old technology returned to the Spread in the form of a mechanical card swipe machine and multipart paper forms. The last time I’d used one of these was almost 30 years ago when I worked in a shop. Swiping the card was easy enough, but banking the forms wasn’t. The problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what to do with the various parts of the forms, but hardly anyone at the bank knew either. I’ll find out in a few days if it’s been succesful. Meanwhile…

…the new machine arrived. I tried to take payment using card details supplied by an agency otherwise known as CNP (Cardholder Not Present) and it said “disallowed transaction”.

“Oops, sorry” said Streamline, “problem at this end – someone had forgotten to check a check box”

Then yesterday I tried to take a regular payment with the cardholder present and it didn’t work. Once again a problem at Streamline. Eventually the problem was sorted to the amusement of the customer who turned out to work in banking. The technology side of banking to be exact.

Then yesterday evening I tried another CNP transaction and it said “disallowed transaction” again. Oh deary me (as Frances would say)

Oh, and the new reception area is pretty well set up now. I just need to tweak my booking software to allow printing of the customer’s details and check-in will be a lot quicker.

Overlap

A follow on to yesterday’s post on roofing. I’d thought I knew what was meant by “overlap” on slates, but it turns out I didn’t. Here’s a (rather bad) diagram…

Mind the gap!

I’ve shown the slates slightly transparent so you can see the ones underneath. So, the overlap is the distance between the blue lines – right?

Wrong!

When a roofer talks about overlap he means the distance between the red lines. If it’s too small water can seep under the top slate and over the bottom one. For a roof like ours it should be about 3 inches. It’s actually around 1 inch.

Proving once again that the hospitality industry is unpredictable we’ve just taken in four German bikers at just before 10pm. They’d come from Edinburgh and if we hadn’t had any space it would have been a long ride to the next hotel. 15 for breakfast tomorrow. Eek!

Unplanned maintenance

You’ll have to pay attention here. When we took over the hotel around 5 years ago one of the first things we did was to get part of the roof of the hotel reslated. If you look at the picture of the hotel on the website it’s the roof over the lower bit of the building at the left. Only the back elevation was redone. A firm from Edinburgh did the work. They have since gone bust/changed name/put on black hats and ridden off into the sunset (that last one describes them best if you follow).

X marks the spot

Anyway. A local roofing firm (a good one) came today to do some remedial work on drainpipes, gutters and suchlike and to find the source of a minor leak in the aforementioned roof. The leak turns out to be due to insufficient overlap between the rows of slates and the whole roof will need re-done. This should be causing us to wring our hands in woe, but it isn’t and here’s why…

The roof in question has, like a lot of the Spread been added to over the years and the current arrangement of beams, cross beams, very cross beams and downright furious beams is not particularly satisfactory. When the structural engineer was asked his opinion a few years ago he said “take it off and start again!”

We were already resigned to having to re-jig the roof supports at the back of the building to get enough height to create a bedroom for Frances (this area is to be our quarters you see) and if we’ve to go to the expense of taking off all the slates then we may as well go the whole way and replace the whole roof. That sounds a bit drastic, but I’ve seen what’s up there and you haven’t.

So the plan (and it’s no more than that at this stage) is to replace the roof and create a living room with platform bed in the upper room and a bathroom and Frances’ bedroom in the lower room. Yes, it’s another “watch this space” moment at the Spread Eagle!

Expansion

Good grief – it’s been a while since I posted here. My only excuse is that the hotel has been pleasingly busy and I’ve been occupied with breakfast, cleaning, paperwork, dinners and suchlike.
Planning has started on the next phase of the renovations. What this will entail is not clear at the moment, but at the very least we’re going to convert the two rooms with shared bathroom into ensuites. The current layout is a double room, a single room and a large bathroom next to each other, so converting it ought to be a no-brainer: make the bathroom into a bedroom and convert the single room into two shower rooms. But this being the Spread there’s a complication in the form of a 30cm difference in floor height between the bathroom and the bedrooms. Problems however are there to be solved and we have an architect on board who’s trying to work his way round it.
Other ingredients in phase 4 (or is it 5b?) of the renovations are the upgrading of a derelict split level room to create a bedroom and living room for us and a bedroom for Frances. If this is done it frees up the whole top floor giving space for another three double bedrooms.
I’ll post more on this when we have plans, costings etc. Meanwhile here’s a cute picture of Frances…

Frances shows off her new wheels

Rearranging the furniture

We closed the public bar in November last year due to rising costs and minimal sales. That’s improved the bottom line slightly but leaves us with a problem – some guests like to sit in the bar before or after dinner and now they can’t

The residents’ lounge at the back of the hotel is next door to the function room which, for various reasons has never been used for a function since the renovations were completed. There’s a bar in it though, so a rather obvious thought occurred to us…

The new residents' lounge

Yes, meet the new residents’ lounge! Bigger, brighter and better…

Residents' lounge bar

and it has a bar!