Here is my frank and honest review of my time at Fawlty Esbank Towers, please do not repost to TripAdvisor as I will have to sue you.
Admittedly, Ewen/Basil had not received my email advising that I hoped to arrive at midday and was that OK? Previously he had indicated my room would be ready at 1pm. So he was a little flustered when I knocked at the wrong door at 12.30pm, the main door as it happened, but there was no advertising nor instruction to act in any particular way.
He hurried me to the door at the left, not actually saying so in words, merely nodding his head and indicating with his arm. ‘No it was not alright that I was there at 12.30 but that now that I was there we’d make do’. I was charmed. Housekeeping and tradies filled the corridors. And there were quite a few corridors. We must have gone through at least five doors before he stopped and said that the chap in my room had wanted another night so I had been given a twin room. No problem, it really was twice the size of the single room.
Then followed a conversation about WiFi. Because the room I would have for the first night was in a separate part of the house than the single room, and there were ‘steel frames’ and the WiFi didn’t work through both parts of the house, best not to connect to the WiFi till tomorrow. He assured me there was WiFi but if I was desperate today there was the pub and the library.
I learned that there was WiFi in the dining room and that’s where I used it. Very occasionally I could get emails in my room, but I could not search on the internet.
I asked about breakfast. It was served at 8.45 only. There was no menu, and you had no choice. Why I asked. 'Everyone ordered scrambled eggs, and I know that they would really like Scottish cooking. Always fresh fruit for first course’. Luckily I was spared the experience till my third day, as I was booked into the Records Centre on days 1 and 2, and they opened at 9am. The train was 25 minutes, and there was WiFi on the train!
Breakfast was a typical interaction. I arrived with a bright smile and asked what was for breakfast. ‘A surprise’, no apparently I really wasn’t allowed to know. It turned out to be fish cakes. The other couple in the dining room, had a few concerns. One it seemed was lack of WiFi, and I let her know that the dining room seemed to work. I will add in all fairness, that Basil did turn on the gas fireplace on day 2 when I sat there to get the WiFi, and it was quite cozy. It had rained all day.
Their other concern was the fish cakes. The woman really couldn’t eat fishcakes a third time! She would prefer French toast, which had been promised to her. Following my fishcakes I had a ‘posty’ because Basil liked to thicken his brogue when he was using Scottish words. However he never liked to explain what they were. Actually it was nice. Kind of a fried pastry?? with a strawberry on top. Coffee and a bread roll with jam.
When I arrived a bit early, to take advantage of the you-know-what in the dining room, Basil dropped the daily paper in front of me. Well it was to say Trump had been found guilty so I said thank you, and started reading. When the other couple arrived, I was instructed to move to their table, ‘and if you don’t know the whole of their lives by the end of breakfast….’ What would happen? I merely replied that ‘Ewen you can’t tell me where to sit’. My table was a lovely one by the window. He already had me pinned as a rebel when I declined breakfast for two days already.
The B&B featured genealogical mugs, and there was a small library of books on the Highlands and Scotland in general under a table. The fire was off to the left of this image. Yes the tablecloths were plastic.
We had a rather garbled conversation about where one could eat in the evening, where he was surprised that I did not need to be guided by him. He was a person who believed he was a bit of a story-teller. Twice I heard him say to others that they would have to ‘endure’ another story. To most questions where a direct response might have been possible, there was instead an anecdote or three, about his past employment, the bungling of other departments, why he was in danger of being closed down, but also why his Internet bill was so high, and that he never used a mobile phone. He also ‘entertained’ a young American couple with an explanation of the ‘4th Jacobite rebellion’ more commonly known as the American war of independence.
I found the easiest way to respond was monosyllabic. Whatever you said was answered with a ‘why would you do that, when ……’. He had absolutely no sense of someone having an alternative perspective.
This was not going well already, but I decided to ask how the meeting with the building inspector went. Apparently it went well. So, emboldened, I asked about getting the receipt for the cash I’d paid up front, my mistake, and to remember that I had not had two breakfasts that I had actually paid up front for. In all the stress of the inspection meeting, he had forgotten to get me a receipt. In preparing the receipt I finally did get, he didn’t seem to have referred back to the costs outlined in his confirmation email to me. The receipt I found on my bed the next day was inaccurate in at least four places, not something I expected from an ‘MBA’. I was going to tackle him about that when the time was right. He had also given my change in a handful of small coin denominations, which I felt was just a bit petty.
To be continued as I am just about to board.
My big QANTAS plane is being cleaned and refuelled. The last leg was probably the best flight ever. I had no one in my row, all the babies slept, food was delicious and I slept about 7 hours.
Feeling more hopeful that Tuesday is not a write off.
In the end I never confronted Basil. On the Friday spent ‘tootling’ around the 25 square miles where Robert Buchan seems to have spent most of his life , ie 5x5 kilometre area, with Helen, I started to feel tired and my sore throat was worse.
That night was a lot of coughing, and on Saturday, the day before I was due to fly home, I tried to get an antibiotic. You see I had ‘foolishly’ given them to Nick. Thus breaking the protective spell that just having a medicine would ward off any disease that medicine might treat.
Kelly advised there was a telephone service. I asked Basil, who had never heard of it. He suggested perhaps his local GP or a pharmacy? Well the GP was closed on Saturday and the closest prescribing chemist was in Edinburgh. Meanwhile Basil had rung NHS24, and was on hold, and so he offered to drive me to the chemist or local A&E - really not required to get an antiobiotic that may not even have been appropriate. I was a little off-put by being directed to the back seat, still with dog sheeting in place. It looked clean enough. But I had started this saga, so I determined to finish it.
We were on the phone for some 30 minutes before being answered. A lady insisted that we pull over and give her an accurate address where we were parked and the colour and make of the car ‘for patient safety’. Basil had parked somewhat illegally on a corner. But having given that detail we must not move until a clinician came on. I then endured a range of inappropriate remarks about his Australian grandmother, descendant of some one illustrious who came back to Scotland and was buried with a wallaby. Even if it was an interesting story, I was too clammy to appreciate it. There were other monologues, mostly about the costs of everything, and if they (the NHS) can’t accept the assessment of an Australian GP then blah blah blah.
I won’t bore you with a quite reasonable assessment triaging telephone call. Finally I could give her my own mobile number, and we were allowed to drive on. But I was still waiting on a call from another clinician, this one with prescribing rights. Then a funny thing happened. At home I do not accept calls from unknown numbers. On my new SIM card, the settings applied. About two hours later I saw that I had missed 4 calls from the same number. When I rang it back, it was not an available number.
A bit despondent, I changed the settings and logically decided that I should spend the last day in Scotland, on a rare sunny day, in my tiny single room ‘resting’ and ‘keeping my fluids up’. I did have a bad cough and I did feel clammy. Not long after I got a call from the doctor again, sweet young thing. But she judged it viral - probably true - and so no antibiotics for me unless I could organize to get to an Assessment Centre. Way too much unnecessary use of the NHS.
However I was starting to feel a lot better, and I think the phone call did it! I decided to go into Edinburgh on the bus that stopped just outside the B&B, rather than the 30 minute walk to the train, although I had a ticket. Good decision, did two hop on-hop off bus tours, including one out to Leith, where I had hoped to visit. I saw Arthur’s Seat which I’d hoped to climb. Another great decision, great weather and really the cough was settling down.
I blithely informed QANTAS that I was not unwell or infectious. Both kinda true.
He’d overcharged me about ten pounds. I think that the hour of his time and the ‘running down of his mobile charge from 100% to 44%’ was worth it. In any case, as you might imagine, I wanted no further contact with him on any topic.
Over 24 hours later he knocked on my door, not long before I was due to leave, and asked 'was there anything he could do for me', after first commenting ‘that I hadn’t died in the night’. I said I was being picked up at 11. Well that’s no good, says he, the girls coming into clean, do the kitchen first, have a cuppa, there is a lovely garden….and when I said I’ll go to the garden, he said, ‘If you stop interrupting me, I was about to say you can stay here till 11’.
I was so glad to leave.
Signing off from onboard the last plane home - Singapore to Sydney. Still no one else in my row😊
Landed now, on second cuppa tea - so restorative. Now I am off to beg the Murray’s driver to let me on an earlier bus if possible. Spoiler alert - there was no earlier bus.
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