Table talk

Time off for bad behaviour
A reduction in the French working week has helped cheaper French hotels to boost their trade, sometimes allowing them to achieve an occupancy rate of more than 100%. According to a report by Paris-based consultancy firm Coach-Omnium, so many men and women are enjoying extramarital flings during their afternoons off that adultery actually accounts for 15% of custom at cheaper French hotels. Hoteliers, of course, prefer to dispute this and instead claim that their daytime customers are simply tired drivers in need of a quick sleep.

Carvery finds man fit to eat Stanley's self-service carvery in Sheringham, Norfolk, bit off more than it could stomach when it ran a promotion inviting customers to eat as much as they liked for £4. Fitness fanatic John Christopher piled his plate 10 inches high with 25 roast potatoes, three large wedges of turkey, a whopping slice of Yorkshire pudding, peas and carrots and swallowed the lot in just 30 minutes. Following complaints from other hungry customers and a refusal to pay a supplement for what managers deemed a quadruple helping, Christopher was banned from the restaurant before he ate the owners out of house and home.

Air care inspires hotels to cough up The tree planting business must be booming if the activities of our nation's environmentally friendly hoteliers is anything to go by. While earlier this year the Heathrow Marriott announced it was planting 2,100 trees to offset the carbon-based emissions produced by its new heat and power system, Hilton is now proclaiming that its Trafalgar hotel is the world's first carbon-neutral hotel. By this it means that the carbon dioxide emissions from the hotel are being balanced by the planting of 3,500 trees in the Home Counties. The theory is that the trees use the carbon dioxide during their growing process. Sounds like it's time Alan Titchmarsh considered becoming a hotelier.

It's a burger to be on time McDonald's would be the first to protest that a really good burger cannot be invented overnight. It may, therefore, empathise with the care taken by rail company GNER when it developed the new on-board beefburger for its East Coast train line. With Scottish beef, focaccia bread and a mixture of relishes, the design of the burger clearly took some thought. But GNER's admission that it took six months to come up with the recipe left us wondering if its food development is as tardy as some of its trains.

Keeping mobile while mobile British holiday-makers never leave home without their mobile phones, if a survey into their packing habits by Thomson Holidays is anything to go by. Not one of the people questioned failed to take their mobile phone away with them, but 3% left their passport behind and one in 20 forgot their suitcase. Deodorant, shampoo and toothbrushes topped the list of unpacked items, while spare shoes and underwear were also neglected. On the return journey, nearly half of our chatty (if whiffy) Brits remembered to pack alcohol for themselves, but only 2% made room for gifts for their friends and family.