In a holiday mood
No shoes, no shirt, no problem: as long as there’s kids
The actor John Cleese (who you can find elsewhere on Substack as a contributor) has been making us laugh since the 1970s with his television, film, educational video and advertising work. The thing with laughter, as he well knows, is that when push comes to shove what you’re laughing at is true. Here he is, with Prunella Scales as his long-suffering wife, Sybille, in the role of Basil Fawlty on the subject of riff-raff:
It is a subject that—tangentially—has prompted discussion in no lesser an echelon than the French Senate: hotels that will not allow you to book with them if you intend bringing your pesky children with you. Senator Laurence Rossignol has sparked debate by saying that “children aren’t troublesome pets.”
If you’d like to take five minutes to contemplate that statement, intended as an off-hand dismissal of the proposition that they are, you can do so now. Because some people say that that is precisely what children are. However, that is for another day. If you’d like to read about Mme Rossignol’s objections to those with objections to children in public spaces, I encourage you to do so here.
One way to shield yourself from the riff-raff is to price yourself out of their market, although that can prove an uncertain tactical ploy these days: obnoxious people can also be moneyed (some might venture that the reverse is certainly true). It wasn’t for nothing that the railways and steamship companies used to have three classes: one for those who have everything; one for those who have nothing; and one for those who don’t want to pay through the nose to escape the latter, and don’t want to slum it to escape the former. The controversy surrounds a subject of which I have had professional and personal experience.
The professional experience comes from having worked as a tour director over 12 years, for American educational travel programmes, under which schoolteachers chaperoned groups of their students, generally aged between 13 and 17, on coach tours the length and breadth of Europe. Hotel management could sometimes be sniffy about a busload of 30 to 50 youngsters invading their tranquillity. The great thing about a bus tour is that it fills the hotel, however. The sniffiness comes from that with which it is filled, some of which was justified: you are never out of place asking a teenager to replace the ashtray from their room. And the key. And the towel.
I remember one particular tour whose chaperone was a man called Dan, from Oakland, California, of quite discerning taste and culture, who had fixed up some of the accommodations himself in consultation with the firm’s head office in the U.S., so some of the hotels were not on our usual roster. Dan was a teacher of French language and our tour was conducted entirely in France, as an immersion experience for his students. My onboard lectures ranged from the Hundred Years War to the French Revolution, to the production of perfume and how a winery works.
One of his students was a very precocious young gentleman aged only eight. Dan said he’d one day be the president of the United States, and I’ve kind-of been watching out for him of late, but I think his chances might well be tanked now. We managed to lose … the little treasure … in the crowded streets of Montmartre, and it was with a heavy heart and no small panic that I had to organise a strategic square search by participants who were there for the first time. Eventually, having drawn blanks in all directions, I summoned the humility and courage to announce I was going to the police, if Dan would come with me. You can imagine the flood of relief as we entered the dingy police station and saw the sheepish-looking future president of the U.S. sitting with an officer in the hallway on a plastic chair. “Don’t lose him again” is an admonition I will never forget.
It was the late afternoon of a delightful, lazy, summery day a few days later that our coach motored down the banks of the River Cher to Montrichard and the Château de Chissay. I was generally more used to hotels of the genre Mercure, Ibis, or former glories for the accommodation of travelling businessmen laid up for the undemanding requirements of the adolescent traveller (like the Bedford Hotel near London’s Marble Arch, where my father used to stay in the 60s and whose decor hadn’t changed since).1 But the Château de Chissay is, shall we say, in a different class. Our coach crawled up the steep ramp to the height from which the castle had once proudly defended the town, with outlook over the entire valley of the Cher, and drew up—appropriately—before the drawbridge in order to unload. The word wow was in prevalence.
Image: the Château de Chissay at Montrichard, on the banks of the River Cher. I’ve since stayed a weekend here privately, and arrived on spec. They had one room for the first night and I’d need to change rooms for the only room they had on the second night. The first night was the dongeon: in the tower, a circular room just below the conical roof, which you see here on the left. The other room was a cottage by the pool, access to which is down the stone stairway. I have known “the highs and lows of Chissay.” They’re still there and are well worth a stay.
Dinner was announced for 7 o’clock sharp, and we settled ourselves into a sociable murmur along with the other guests, amongst whom were also families with children. The napkins were of linen, the silverware extended confusingly both westward and eastward. Our American children kept their hands hidden, as is their wont. The French children laid theirs upon the table, as is theirs.
Our usual dinners with these kinds of groups would be a three-course fixed menu at some chain like the Brasserie Romaine in Paris: fast, furious, efficient and cheap, and exactly what kids needed in order to catch the Bateau Mouche at 8 o’clock. Out in the countryside, six kilometres from Chinon and 12 from Chenonceau, and no night life to speak of, the evening’s pace was not the capital’s, and Dan was delighted when the standard fixed menu turned out to include—naturellement—the cheese board. It contained a variety of local and national specialities, each of which was laboriously explained before being served to the diner by our ever-patient waiters. It took for-bloody-ever, but it was just one of a panoply of cultural insights that left their deep impressions on these American fast-food habitués.
The thanks on the morrow, from me and my group to the staff and from them to us, were gracious and heartily meant. We proceeded on our way, and, after a day of visiting the Loire Valley châteaux, our next stop wouldn’t be vastly different, this time an ancient stone pile plonked right in the middle of a vineyard.
Youngsters of course raise their voices when they’re excited or playing. Dan would chide them gently if they raced down the corridor, lightly brushing Renaissance masters hanging on the wall or suits of armour on the corners as they went, and the stillness of the vineyard at night bore an admonitory caution for us to mimic its tranquillity within.
The TV series Fawlty Towers was a pastiche inspired by the hotel where the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail had stayed, including John Cleese himself. The central idea of the television programme was the same as the real place: the hotelier couldn’t look after the guests if guests kept bothering him. Adults can be every bit as irritating as children.
Later, I was holidaying on a two-centre trip in Greece. Our company rep approached us on Mykonos to advise us that our hotel on Santorini had changed: we’d been upgraded, to a much nicer hotel. Well, they don’t tell you why you’re going to complain about it up front, do they?
It is true that this new hotel was of a higher category. But we liked the one we had initially chosen precisely because of one aspect: it was a family hotel, and would therefore be bubbling with activity and chatty people. Family hotels are more sociable than VIP hotels.
But a change is a change and we approached it with a positive frame of mind. Of course, we’d been upgraded, so we got the broom cupboard. Okay, you could’ve got quite a lot of brooms in it, but we had more than just our brooms with us. Air-conditioning? Sorry, not for broom cupboards. The pool boasted classy-looking sunloungers, however. All eight of them. Eight sunloungers. You needed to be quick off your marks, because otherwise, you lay on concrete. And, of course, there were the ubiquitous German towels.2
The hotel had a wonderful vantage point of the turn-around area at the head of Kamari airport’s runway. Where the aircraft rev up. Luckily, we both smoked at that time, so it wasn’t so very bad. For those that were arriving by air over Cape Akrotiri, let’s just say it is not often that you can read the hatch-opening instructions on an aircraft’s belly from the indubitable comfort of your hotel balcony.
Yes, we were told, they do have a bar, but it’s early in the season, so it’s closed. We can get drinks from the hotel next door. “Maybe we should move into the hotel next door?” I said. The receptionist smiled, but said nothing. There were no children at this hotel and it was sterile. It had no soul, no laughter, no flip-flops. It was manicured and tasteful and dead. That afternoon we visited the company’s office in the town and listed our dissatisfactions, and, upon being summoned, there appeared the owner of another hotel. He bundled us and our belongings into his car and presented us with a huge room with outlook to the Aegean and our own kitchen area into the bargain. And, down by the swimming pool, we could hear the laughter and squeals of holidaying happiness. “Is this all right?” the Greek asked. “We love it!” I said.
If you want to holiday in the absence of youth, that’s really fair enough. The optimum way to steer clear of the riff-raff is maybe even to stay at home. But holidaying child-free is not just a choice about who is not in the hotel with you. It is very much a choice of who is in the hotel with you, and that can get you positively yearning for the sound of squealing kids.
Images: (above) the Alexandra Hotel in Kamari, Santorini. This is the one we rejected.
(Below) the Aegean View Hotel, at the other end of Kamari, which we loved.
It’s now the Marriott and has indeed been made over.
I wonder if the AfD produces beach towels?