Enough already!

It’s June. In fact it’s nearly July.

Not that you’d know it from this picture which could have been taken any day in the last three weeks. Dark, grey and rainy with occasional thunder, lightning and plagues of frogs.
Well, maybe not the frogs. But it’s been pretty miserable.
What else? Well, we’re seeing some non residents coming in for dinner although not in the numbers we’d hoped for. I’m promised that the joiner will be back on Thursday to complete the snagging which should have been completed in March. I’m not holding my breath.

Laundry monster slain!

Big yellow bags of sheets and towels have arrived in the laundry courtesy of NHS direct, the commercial laundry arm of the NHS. We chose them to do our laundry for a very sound business reason – absolutely EVERYONE else uses them.
The clean laundry arrives, we use it and then put it into another bag for collection. The only things we wash ourselves are duvet covers and the wee bathmats. The amount of time and work this saves is considerable and with the two extra rooms full at the weekend we wouldn’t have been able to do all the laundry ourselves.

We only had one guest in last night. Much despondency. Then around 6pm there was a call from the TIC – did we have a room for four Norwegian bikers? We did, and they all had dinner with us. Much happiness.
Rain of epic proportions yesterday evening. Summer in Scotland – can’t beat it!

Broader view

Here’s a nice picture of the Eildon Hills which I have completely spoiled by standing in front of it. The viewpoint is called “Scott’s View” since it was apparently a favourite spot for Sir Walter Scott, author of unreadable historical novels and regular visitor to the Spread Eagle Hotel.

The weekend was… eventful. I’ll leave it at that.  Eleven dinners on Friday and ten on Saturday.

Historical details

The plan to renovate the front of the hotel has been resurrected. Although we have planning permission for most of the work there are a couple of things we need to get cleared before we can go ahead. Take a look at this picture which Cath Smibert’s sister sent us last year…

Now, the things we need to apply for permission to do are

• Re-instate that vertical lettering in the angle of the building
• Put a sign above the public bar
• Install wee floodlights above the main sign.

I sent this picture to Karen Hope at Scottish Borders Council for reference. Although I’d looked at it before, something caught my eye. The photo’s a bit fuzzy so I don’t know if you can make it out.

Above the front door there is a wooden double headed eagle. In this photo, taken around 1958, there is… something else there. I can’t make it out, but it looks like a shield or something. So the wooden eagle is not as old as we’d thought – less than 50 years anyway. Dianne, can your Mum remember what was there during your time at the Spread?

We continue to get a small, but steady stream of dinner guests. Two residents and two chance yesterday. We’re full on Saturday with the Kelso dog show, but I suspect most of the residents will not be in Jed for dinner.

Complacency

So we’d finished serving main courses to six guests and I started clearing up. Ed reminded me that we still had puddings to do. “Oh, puddings are easy!” I said airily. “Nothing can go wrong”.

So that was that. The gods of chaos heard me and gathered round to watch the fun.

Two sticky toffee puddings and two apple crumbles. First I microwaved the sticky toffee sauce for 50 seconds instead of 15 resulting in something that Yellowstone Park would have been proud of. Once it had cooled a little I put the top on and tried to drizzle sauce over the puddings, but the bottle of superheated sauce decided to behave more like a soda syphon than a drizzler.

Meanwhile the apple crumbles sitting under the grill caught fire. Literally – jet black and flaming. Ed my taciturn Lithuanian kitchen porter looked at the smoking ruins and  said “Is fine” while Ingrid attempted unsucessfully not to laugh.

Ah well, the crumbles were rescued, the sticky toffee sauce cleaned off the walls and everyone seemed happy with the results.

Earworm

Most mornings I have a tune floating around my head. Usually it’s from listening to Kerrang last thing at night as the bar is closing and recently it’s usually been “Monster” by the Automatic. This morning for some inexplicable reason I found Rush’s “Spirit of Radio” had taken up residence in my head. Inexplicable because I haven’t heard it in years and have never listened to it all the way through. It seemed to help breakfast for 10 to go with the minimum of stress though.

Dinner last night came with a minimum of stress too because there were only two customers. It’s early days though – we’re thinking of sending out leaflets to tell the gastronomes of Jedburgh that we are here. While the hotel is an infinitely better place now than it was three years ago it is proving a little harder to change people’s perceptions of the place. The commonest description we hear (usually from people who know the hotel but have never been in) is “a bit run down” or “a bit of a dive” or “not the kind of place we would go”. Not being able to improve the front of the building this year was unfortunate, but anyone we have persuaded to come in for a look around has been very impressed. Getting people to come in is a little harder.