My Fawlty Towers

If you can afford the bill, I heard that there are still places to stay in London for the Olympic Games this year if you are in search of  hotels.

Money talks, most of the exclusive hotel rooms have been booked by Olympic officials, dignitaries. Some companies have block-booked rooms for favored customers.  But, there are plenty of other options left.

So, do consider still ‘taking tea’ at the Ritz, or book yourself in for a night in the Art Deco room at Claridges. 

London’s iconic hotels:  Claridges, The Connaught and The Berkeley still have a few rooms left, even The Goring Hotel has vacancies (not to be confused with Goering of Hermann fame).  The Goring is the luxury hotel where Kate Middleton stayed the night before her wedding last year to Prince William.

Not too many years ago these grand old-fashioned hotels were the meeting place, for everyone.  People visiting the city, on vacation or business would stay and bump into locals who have stopped by after a shopping trip to have tea or celebrate a birthday and stay for the hotel dinner available.

There would be an opportunity to visit the summer lawns and Edwardian rooms full of chintz wall paper / fabric and china tea cups. Next time somebody calls a floral design wallpaper “chintzy“, I might just have to allow them to be informed that the crew I hang with loved chintz.  It’s never out of style.  

Come to think of it, many may have even been overly sentimental as well (schmaltzy AND chintzy); yet I digress. Now, what snobbery, hob-nobbery was I on about again? 

Certainly by evening time guests at the hotel and locals would gather for evening drinks.  You had a chance to cozy up in the area called the ‘snug’ if you sought quietness, a chance to be discrete, cloak and dagger. Nowadays, many folks take pride in bellowing indiscretions upon the cell phone they treat like a Sergeant under mortar fire; screaming into a hot mic for an air strike.

I worked in this type of old-fashioned hotels growing up and it was very cozy.  The more recent wave of London hotels specialize in keeping the public away.  They have had to concentrate on investments funded by businessmen from Arabia.  Things have changed somewhat and Sharia may get amended when at the Connaught.

For those seeking some of the new brands of hotels, you get to have the more masculine padded walls and thick carpet in the halls to hush out sounds of London, and security guards will man each floor.  It will run you a mere $2,400 a night, with a minimum stay of a week. Heck, I’m good for a year at $876,000. I mean, it’s worth it — You’ll have a butler to fetch newspapers, open up the Woodbury Patch online for you, organize dinners, call taxis — anything involving contact with the rest of us on the outside world. Sweet for some.

Oh, the best part of the deal is that the penthouse suite comes with the free use of an Aston Martin — one of Bond‘s favorite cars. Tell me that’s not worth a mill?

While you are at it, go the whole hog, UPGRADE — Five bedroom luxury penthouse apartments overlooking Hyde Park in London (acquired by Henry the 8th from the unsuspecting monks of Wesminster), is available for hire during the Olympics this year at $17,600 a night and this also includes a maid, a butler and the Aston Martin car.  At $6.4 M, I’m afraid “you must suffer me to go my own dark way” says Dr. Jekyll in Hyde Park. 

As part of London’s Olympic crucial bid to host the Olympics,  hotels guaranteed that the  industry would be able to offer several thousands of rooms at a variety of prices.

My kind of hotel is The Fawlty Towers.

Have you ever seen Fawlty Towers, the British sit-com back in the 1970‘s?  Only 12 episodes were made.   

It is located in a fictitious hotel in the seaside town of Torquay, on the "English Riviera." The plots center around rude and deranged manager Basil Fawlty, it features his bossy wife Sybil, a sane chambermaid Polly and hapless Spanish waiter Manuel, originally from Barcelona. Their attempts to run the hotel amidst farcical situations and an array of demanding and eccentric guests.

Basil often finds himself on the receiving end of the wife’s temper; she verbally and physically abuses him. Basil is foolish, suspicious of guests, & usually turns to Manuel or Polly to help him with his schemes, while trying his best to keep Sybil, the wife from discovering them.  

The scenarios in Fawlty Towers are reminiscent of some of the more modest and unassuming hotels I worked at overseas and even though everyone is messed up in some way, the stay is both beautiful, memorable and fun.  And real life characters were a most luxurious experience.  The actual hotel that actors from Monty Python stumbled upon in the early 70s was located in County Devon or Devonshire -- and the actual owner, a Donald Sinclair; intrigued John Cleese so immensely, that even after all the other actors couldn’t stick the pompous retired Royal Navy owner any longer and moved out — Cleese remained, to study.

Escaping Like a Billionaire  

Donald Trump has a golf resort here in Rio Grande, east of the island.  The beach resort was once a giant coconut and sugarcane plantation.   Every detail is perfectly thought out, built on Coco Beach. 

While it is wonderful to experience some of this…I’m done with the quiet golden-sand beach and I’m not that interested in designer wine chillers, stocked with Champagne.  I’m itching to explore any mysterious and wild history, not get locked away in some billionaire’s refuge with Agnes and Beatrice III.

I like Trump so I’m curious about his involvement. I read some disclaimer from Trump International on the web-site.   The disclaimer is confusing, lawyerie talk, I still don’t know what it meant.  Trump has golf international places/golf standard places in Scotland, CA, NY, NJ, Philly, and here in PR. 

I booked the place on Priceline, so they did not get top buck from us.  Not that they didn’t try.  Everything is “Sir, it is advisable to up-grade, even that colorless, odorless gas you are breathhhhingahhhhhh“.  I thought I heard this between the forked tongue of the succubus behind the dark mahogany -- but it was late.

Between meeting security guards all over the property, around every corner (albeit they were very friendly) and a fear of taking in more air that we were allowed on the property for the imaginary upgrades - the enchanting place didn‘t always give pleasure to the senses to a few mid-Westerners. “Ya, ye know dare; like, where’s de free conta-nental breakfast an’ all?”

I would take Old Fawlty Towers with its eccentric welcome, unintended insults and aberrant denizens any day.  Stays at hotels ought to be a seamless and in cohesive tumble of resident oddballs, country folk, inner city characters / cards; offering  fascinating conversation, be it artistic, financial, “me bones know the weather“, gardening musings or just juicy gossip…and yet folks need to know when to back off and leave a feller or m’lady alone, and like Fawlty advised when Germans visited, “don’t bring up the war!” Which, of course, he did.  

30 years later Fawlty is still unrivaled.  We really should build a Fawlty Towers for Woodbury.  How idiosyncratic it shall appear next to Home Depot, Applebees, Perkins, Brueggers, Old Navy and Red Lobster. The Mississippi Riviera down the bog of Pigseye.