Table talk
Somewhere to get your teeth in, too
A Scottish hotelier has set up a laboratory in his back garden to provide hospitality far beyond most run-of-the-mill room-service requests. Guests staying for a short break can leave with a brand new set of gleaming white teeth. Ian Fyfe, owner of the Craigerne hotel in Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, worked for more than 20 years as a dental technician before buying the 11-bedroom hotel in 2000. Fyfe, who set up the laboratory three weeks ago, has already given new teeth to four guests. He said that painful, ill-fitting dentures had limited them to soup when they arrived, but they were tucking into steak by the end of their stay.
He may have to shed his ambitions
TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson's ambitions to become a chicken farmer have been thwarted by South Oxfordshire Council's refusal to let him build a chicken shed in his Thames-side garden. His neighbours have also objected. He was hoping to add the chickens to his present stock of 22 pigs as a sideline to his television career. He has appealed against the ruling, and the council is expected to respond at the end of the month.
Always water the pot plants
Mike Egan, landlord of the White Lion in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, recently made an unusual discovery in the window box of his pub. He had no idea that a huge cannabis plant was bursting through his begonias. A customer told Egan that he could see some "weed" in among the flowers, but as the plant was in one of the boxes at the top of the pub that are watered automatically, it had gone undetected until it reached about 2ft in height.
Egan received many offers from patrons willing to test the plant by taking it home and drying it out - but he decided to call the police instead. They promptly arrived and took the plant away for further inspection. One theory as to how the cannabis plant found its way into the pub's floral display was that a hemp seed had been dropped by a passing bird. Before the police took the plant away, Egan's window box had a street value of more than £200.
You say potatoes, I say Roy Hudds
Holiday Inn has published an online dictionary entitled "I Say Tomarto, You Say Tomayto" to foster a greater understanding between us Brits and our friends across the Atlantic. Everyone knows that in American English a vacation means a holiday, but if I told you that while staying in a US hotel I put my watch on the credenza and then pulled the comforter over my head, would you know what I was talking about? The next day at dinner I asked the server to hold the garden and then paid my folio before leaving. Capisce?
And if that seems indecipherable, spare a thought for our US cousins. Holiday Inn has kindly provided them with a dictionary of cockney rhyming slang to try out while they're having a butcher's round dear old Blighty. (Glossary: credenza = sideboard, comforter = duvet, server = waiter/waitress, hold the garden = no salad, folio = full hotel bill, capisce? = understand?)
