Table talk
Press pins a tale on donkey-sausage shop
A French delicatessen owner has been obliged to stop making donkey sausages after newspaper reports claimed animal rights lobbyists were targeting his shop in Sandwich, Kent. Dominique Levet had been selling his donkey-meat, salami-type sausages for more than three years. His eight varieties proved to be a hit until the reports appeared in the press. He has now discontinued the entire range. Levet said: "I don't know where the story started but it's all untrue. However, I didn't want to upset anybody so I just stopped that part of the business."
But where do you keep your mobile phone?
How do you extract money from naked clients at a hotel spa? Yunessun, a hi-tech hot springs hotel in Hakone, west of Tokyo, exploits smart-card technology to solve the age-old problem of carrying one's money and locker key around when visiting a swimming pool. On entering and paying, guests are handed a waterproof wristband along with a towel. The wristband acts as both a key and a debit card. Reaching the locker room, simply wave the wristband over the corresponding locker to open and shut the door. Hungry? Thirsty? At the snack bars, wave your wristband over the point-of-sale register, and anything you order is charged automatically to your room. When leaving the spa area, wave the wristband over an exit machine, which displays your bill for using the spa. Upon inserting payment you receive an exit card, which allows you out. Simple!
An inn spectre calls…
The owners of a Welsh hotel are convinced that they have an unexpected full-time guest - the ghost of a former landlady. Strange things started happening as soon as Peter Morley and Linda Warsop took over the George Borrow hotel in Ponterwyd, near Aberystwyth. Warsop said: "Keys disappeared from their hooks, plates moved from one place to another - it was very odd. Then our dog disappeared, and after hunting round the whole hotel we found him locked in a room he could never have got into himself. The next thing was the sound of furniture being moved upstairs in the middle of the night - even though there was no one else in the hotel - very spooky." Regulars believe the ghostly goings-on are down to the spirit of a charismatic landlady who ran the hotel in the 1950s.
What's yellow and dangerous?
There's nothing new under the sun, including food poisoning. Indeed, if a trawl through the archives of the British Hospitality Association is anything to go by, there are worse things than salmonella. In 1914, the association's monthly report described "the Cholet Poisoning Mystery". This might sound like a case for Miss Marple, but it was actually a real-life caterer's nightmare. At a wedding feast in France, 30 guests were poisoned and nine died after a cook carrying a variation of the paratyphoid virus made custard and left it standing for four hours so that the virus had time to multiply. The report does not record whether the bride and groom were among the victims.
