Table talk
But is it ‘on yer bike' if he fails?
We all know how difficult it is to recruit staff. It's particularly hard in remote areas of Cornwall without the bright lights of Penzance or, er… Newquay to attract people. So incentives are important. That's why hotelier Richard Young at the recently opened Lugger hotel in Portloe has promised head chef Franz Hornegger a Mercedes if he can achieve a Michelin star. Presumably it will be upgraded to a Ferrari if he gets two?
Lie back and think of England
For a limited period only, visitors to Liverpool can spend the night with an old queen. As part of the city's Biennial of contemporary visual art, a hotel room has been built around the city's 20m high Queen Victoria monument. The hotel room is the work of artist Tatsurou Bashi, and is reached by a lift or stairs. Two guests can sleep with the formidable monarch's stone features glowering over the bed for around £100. The hotel room/work of art is open to the public during the day. Bookings run until 24 November.
The enchanting world of Spam-heads
The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, celebrated its first anniversary this month. On our visit we were greeted by a pleasant white-haired woman who calls herself a Spambassador. We then met Spammy, the smiling, waving can with big clunky feet, and saw the huge globe that shows all the places where Spam is sold and eaten. We made our way through rooms and corridors festooned with hundreds of items bearing the Spam logo: shirts, caps, footballs, stuffed animals, flashlights and alarm clocks. But the biggest seller is still cans of the luncheon meat, closely followed by glow-in-the-dark Spam boxer shorts. "Stay as long as you like - and have a Spamtastic time," said the Spambassador with a straight face.
Go on… force yourself for a worthy cause
The London branches of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) have released figures this week showing a dwindling core of London pubs. To help stop the rot it has launched Pub Awareness Week, which started on Monday (14 October). To stop your local succumbing to the trend and closing - to become a trendy bank, perhaps - Camra has put its formidable marketing machine into gear and come up with an ingenious way of highlighting the plight of the boozer. Pub Awareness Week is a special week when Londoners are urged to "visit a pub during the week". Innspired!
For an extra fiver he'll throw in the Millennium Dome
Wookey Hole Caves, a series of interlinked caverns and partly flooded chambers in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, is up for sale for the first time in history with a guide price of £3m. The first visitor to the caves dates from 189AD. Wookey Hole Caves became a formal tourist attraction in the 1920s and have been run by the Tussauds Group. The agent for the sale, Nigel Talbot-Ponsonby of HLL Humberts Leisure, is famous for having sold Land's End three times in the last 20 years.
