How our hospitality industry and its clients can learn from our continental cousins and their relationship with respect.

Continental Europe is a refreshing breath of fresh air for any Briton looking to eat great food, drink excellent alcohol and stray away from the quintessential British features that make Britain so…British. Staying in Seville for three months I indulged in the pleasures of Tapas and lifted my restraint on alcohol (see first blog post) and suffered heavily at the hands of Vermouth hangovers. Listing off the differences between a September in England and the September I was so very much enjoying in the southern Andalusian city, I found that among cuisine and weather, the customer service, or often lack of, also proved to be quite refreshing.

After being tipped off about a certain feature of the European hospitality industry, I too noticed a difference immediately on arrival. Hospitality is a profession, not just a dead-end summer job. Waiting staff were almost always in their thirties or older, they knew what they were doing and, outstandingly and to my surprise, they didn’t take any shit.

I spent numerous years in and out of the hospitality industry, each time vowing never to return, each time resenting myself when I inevitably did. Working mostly in bars and pubs, I never envied those who stormed back and forth across restaurant floors waiting on tables. Low wages and long hours are what await those willing to serve the hungry and quench the thirsty.

Ask anyone who works in the hospitality industry in the UK what their frustrations consist of during their shifts, and undoubtedly interacting with clientele will be one of them. At some point in their careers pouring pints or clearing tables they’ve had a run in with at least one pompous entitled customer or a cantankerous, surly, old piss-head.
All this is to be expected from any eight to twelve hour shift in a social, customer facing environment, not all meetings with visitors can be amicable. So why should staff be forced to reciprocate amicably?

In a typical Spanish restaurant or bar, a bad attitude will be reciprocated with an equally sour tone, regardless of what side of the counter or bar it was instigated on. Why do we not exact these same standards on consumers and the hospitality industry in the UK? Why do people feel that they are by default, a social echelon higher than hospitality staff? You wouldn’t think the same of someone fixing your boiler or nursing your cat back to health, so why the big difference with someone pouring your pint?

When money goes over a counter a certain quality of service is expected and speaking out when there has been an unfair exchange of money and service is essential, not just in the hospitality service but throughout all trading, in all industries and professions.
However, In the UK hospitality workers are expected to act as cannon fodder for those who assume that paying for something, also buys them a ticket to a verbal turkey shoot.

Our British culture is a mixed bag. A history of dog-eared war fighters blended with a dose of the stiff upper lip, politeness and stoicism. Perhaps this cultural example is what makes hospitality workers so inclined to feel obliged to take shit, an industry wide pay of homage to a quiet and docile manor, forged in the grit and fire of violent adversity….Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
‘The customer is always right’ is something thrown around so much it has become a cliché of itself. We seem to have grown accustomed to a real time, cheat code free ‘god mode.’

The unbelievable speech that people take for a test drive when eating out is tantamount to that of some feudal system, the gentry speaking down to the low life serfs. Our spit shined, polished perception of our country and its hospitality is the exact reason it suffers so badly. ‘8 hours of taking shit then I’m done’ was the motto for much of my time in hospitality and this mentality is a rot in any workplace whether flipping burgers or foaming cappuccinos.

This is where the Spanish flipped us and built a class hospitality service. Operational and fast yet unrefined. Professional, career veteran waiting staff who know how to run their place of work, bring you what you want and you sit and enjoy it. However, walk in with a stick up your arse and be prepared to walk out with it shoved down your throat.
While risking a cantankerous restaurateur dismissing, or even slightly insulting you is a possibility, the sacrifice is worth it, and the remedy is simple. Give the shit back. You treat someone like dog shit, you get treated like dog shit yourself, a tried and tested practice that crosses all borders, ethnicities and cultures.

The British custom of being polite and accommodating to customers, no matter what, poses a big problem. Like internet trolls pursuing an online target, entitled and pretentious customers are all too aware that their tirades are without consequence. Unlike internet trolls however, disgruntled clientele lack the luxury of not having to look into their recipients eyes or watch them deflate, or the veins in their necks bulge with repressed anger.
So why do people feel so comfortable with behaving this way? Like a school kid telling a bus driver to fuck off, customers, like school kids, know that the price of retaliation is high for those on the clock wishing to defend their self respect.
The problem isn’t necessarily the customers, they are used to this one-sided confrontation by now. The issue lies in the sword hanging over the heads of those wanting to stick up for themselves and the culture of normalising it.

Having a customer complaint, regarding a member of staff, put to the manager used to mean future pay checks fell at the mercy of superiors, often people who had themselves climbed the ranks and were willing to humour grouchy customers with promises of sackings. This gave the dissatisfied that warm fuzzy feeling when they know someone will be standing outside job centre plus the next morning.
However, customers can now not only ruin one employees evening but also crush a businesses reputation with an online nail bomb of a review on platforms such as Trip Adviser. I can’t help but read with a hint of suspicion when I see an review scorning ‘rude’ and ‘disrespectful’ staff, knowing the unfair trade of etiquette that is expected of them, and the perceived insolence felt by self-aggrandising customers, armed with a non-filtered review site and a point to prove.

The ‘take it on the chin and smile’ attitude that we project onto hospitality workers helps no one. The strain of having to pucker up and grin whenever someone decides to flex their social muscles is enough to give anyone in the industry, for over ten years, a rough case of stomach ulcers.
It makes patrons believe they have some sort of diplomatic immunity and reduces the amount of passionate and would-be qualified people building careers in the industry.

Having worked in the hospitality industry I know what it means for someone to speak to you nicely and to be spoken to like waste. Being treated like a person and not a waiter droid makes a huge difference in your day, However, being treated with the respect of someone who will defend themselves when slighted, is where an industry grows and people learn that respect comes from far deeper than a restaurant bill.

Having an active imagination doesn’t mean needing the supernatural to answer unsolved questions.

As a young boy of about 8, I remember sprinting down toward a lake in a Hertfordshire camping ground only to stop dead in my tracks, eyes squinting through the first layer of the dark green guts of the forest about 20 metres away.
A tail swayed tantalisingly out of a ditch, the sure sign of an animal snooping around in the dirt. After a few steps forward to further investigate, a large black cat stood at the edge of a narrow pit. A Jaguar?  A leopard? A Panther? Running back to my Dad, in terms more appropriate to an 8 year old, he said Bollocks.

The powder keg mix of inquisition and imagination is one of the wonders of childhood, I still to this day, in my minds eye, see a giant looming black Jaguar skulking through the woods. This wouldn’t be the first potential large cat sighting in the UK, not even the first in Hertfordshire.

Reported sightings across the country have turned up a long list of potential non-native predators up and down the British countryside. Some have followed been followed by a trail of dead livestock while others have been subject to peculiar photos and videos.
However, I have to concede that it could be, after all, bollocks. Our charming and colourful imaginations does have a habit of churning out an awful long list of, unverifiable, false positives. That same cognitive cocktail can lead to kids drunk on ideas of ghosts, monsters and beneath the bed dwellers.

As much as there have been supposed sightings of large cats, try looking at your own cat or a neighbours for a minute or two. They move just like a predator that would stalk a gazelle or some other poor bottom of the food chain sucker. A cat in the woods is not an unlikely conclusion to this Hertfordshire mystery.

The problem with my sighting is that it is forever locked in the volatile imagination of that 8 year old boy, checked only by the scepticism of a man in his late 30s. No rewind, no pause and no zoom. The cat will be forever stuck in a limbo of the exciting extreme it was on that summer day, and the drawn out view of reality it is now.

Like my big cat, every sighting dragged from the past is a murky muddy stew of conjecture and conviction, a struggle between what you believe to be fact, what you want to be fact and what is fact.

Working in an old pub in a sleepy old village It was  my turn at taking a sceptical approach for a spin. A piece of CCTV footage showed a bottle of ginger ale falling off a low shelf after a sheet of paper on a notepad fluttered as if caught by the wind, both instances in the dead of night well after close and seemingly of both object’s own volition. A cry of foul play by ghosts seemed to be the general consensus from my colleagues and a superstitious patron.

I couldn’t tell you why the bottle fell or the paper fluttered, that remains a mystery, one of the world’s great mysteries forever lost in time. However, I can list off a host of potential reasons. A draft, a creaky loose shelf, over enthusiastic shagging vibrating through the building from the chef living upstairs. The list goes on. Ghosts are somewhere down the list with invisible time travellers and that same cat returning to torment my brain. I can disprove all these theories as effectively as someone can prove them.

Believing in ghosts, ghouls or anything that lives within a Harry Potter book is one thing but believing that they are the source of every unexplainable event must be an absolutely insane way to use ones head. My car span out the other day, I think it was an oil spill on the road, not an assault by a unicorn. My dog used to bark at nothing, it probably WAS just barking at nothing, it’s a dog, it probably wasn’t arguing with a poltergeist.

I don’t claim to be more enlightened, more intelligent or more educated than the ghost people, I just think the list goes longer than we give it credit for. I think it’s ok to say I don’t know what caused something to happen, it’s ok to not have a simple answer to a vague question. If a child hears a bump in the night, what’s healthier, telling them it was probably the plumbing, or strapping the poor little bastard to the bed and calling in the priest to perform an exorcism? This question does have a definitive answer, call social services, they’ll tell you.

Letting the imagination run wild is an exciting and fruitful exercise and can lead to some extraordinary results. Big cats may be roaming the countryside, creeping through the long grass, braving the elements in a land foreign to their makeup, I may have even seen one. On the other hand I may have seen someone’s domestic cat looking for mice. A falling bottle or a fluttering piece of paper may be a ghost or it may be leprechauns or magical gnomes. It may also be a faulty shelf , a building sensitive to vibration or an open window.
The list goes on and the thick of it lies between the most implausible and bizarre to the banal and ordinary.

The death penalty still holds its weight in the public, but how long will this grizzly punishment avoid redundancy?

Forfeiting life as punishment has echoed through the ages, ancient civilisations and modern alike have acted on a desire for vindication. From murder and war crimes, to theft and drug offences, the timeline of criminal justice has often seemed to show a penchant for being unforgiving.
Despite our past, it seems the worlds taste for capital punishment is starting to bitter. But does this reflect our emotional and pragmatic decisions on what should be done with our most intense offenders?

Last week Sri Lanka ended its moratorium of the death penalty by announcing that two people are to be hanged, the first in forty three years. Despite courts continuing to hand down the death sentence throughout this time, the gallows have been collecting dust since 1976.
President Sirsena claimed the resuming of state hanging was in aid of the nation’s efforts to combat the drugs trade.

However Sri Lanka’s move to hang the condemned is relatively uncommon in comparison with the attitudes of the international community.

According to Amnesty International the number of people killed by judicial executions, in 2018, had dropped by 31% since the previous year. The Amnesty International Global Report On Death Sentences And Executions 2018, also reported that some international leaders in executions, such as Iran and Iraq, have also decreased their use of the practice.

However, despite the fall in the capital punishment overseas, where does this leave Britain?

Britain ditched the death penalty in 1965 a year after the hanging of convicted murderers Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen. In the 54 years that passed since abolition, public opinion has remained high in favour of this ultimate punishment. Only recently has the tide of perception begun turning.
According to the NetCan British Social Attitudes Report 2017, British public opinion shows 48% in favour of the death penalty, falling under 50% for the first time ever.

While the gradual shift in support is optimistic and interesting, 48% still remains a high number. It is not supposed those in favour want to see people having hands cut off for stealing livestock or buried neck-deep waiting for high-tide, but what does our taste for retribution consists of?

Crimes against children and terrorism are often two matters that invigorate public outrage, The News Of The World published the details of convicted child sex offenders in its Name And Shame campaign in 2000, leading to lynch mob style hunts for those with their details published, targeting, among others, a paediatrician. The mob vandalising her home due to a vocabulary mistake. a light outcome compared with a confusion the other way around.

The opinions for or against are perceived to camp on each side of the political identity border. For the death penalty on the right wing, against on the left. As published in a YouGov poll on what people wanted to happen after Brexit, 53% of leave voters and 54% of UKIP voters wanted a return to the death penalty.

Support is not just reserved for the right and centre-right,1/5 of remain voters wanted a return to capital punishment with 28% of labour supporters swaying in the same direction. Though a pattern can be seen, in terms of voter-ship, diving into the trap of identity politics may still be a mistake.

These murky waters aren’t just confined to the realms of public populism, the political arena often lacks clarity on this issue. The home secretary Saajid Javid has been criticised for not expressing a need for assurance that the US would not execute two captured British ISIS fighters if deported back to The States.
Previous UKIP leader, Paul Nuttall, expressed his support for the death penalty despite clarifying it not being official UKIP policy. He would not be the first mainstream political figure, heavily in the public eye, to express a similar view in the last 10 years.

The UK is not unique in its changing attitudes towards how justice is carried out in the criminal justice system. Along with a decreasing number of executions and death sentences comes an increasing number of nations beginning to turn their back on the hangman, the firing squad and the lethal injection.
Often through moratoriums, countries such as Burkina Faso, Malaysia and Gambia are some of the latest to follow this trend.

Though shrouded in state secrecy, China is alleged to be the worlds leader in executions with the state putting to death over 1000 people in 2017. The US falls around the middle of the table.

A US Gallop poll indicates that favour for the death penalty in The States has fallen gradually over the last 20 years or so. The number in favour still hovers over half at 56%, but dropping by 23% in the last 30 years. Over half the states in USA still practice the death penalty including 4 states, California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Oregon, which have imposed a moratorium.

According to the Death Penalty Information Centre, Abolitionist states generally tend to suffer less violent crime. With this in mind, can it be possible for the eye-for-an-eye model to run in conjunction with its image of an effective deterrent?
For myself this is where the paths separate into parallels. The question of punishment should not be boiled down to whether people deserve to live or die, what we think of who should live or die is irrelevant.
The paramount target and result of a criminal justice system should ultimately be whether it can create a society that has learned from the crimes committed by its convicted, and create a safer environment for those in the present and the future.

It is correct, the death penalty does prevent the guilty from re offending, but it does not stop others from offending. restorative justice for small crimes and first time offenders has shown a dramatic decrease in the likelihood of that person further committing crime.

Our approach to punishment should boil down to two main areas, does it amount to justice? And does it help to reduce crime and the number of those who fall victim to crime? The issue seems to be that one cannot always be reconciled with the other. Disregarding humanitarian arguments and the role of the state in killing for the time being, if a crime such as murder is punished by death but this death shows no further utility, there is no argument in favour apart from an emotional drive for vengeance.

Perhaps with support for the death penalty gradually decreasing, Britain will move with the tides of progress and further navigate its way through a fair justice system of empathy yet pragmatism. Though we, the public, gradually lose our taste for the hangman’s noose, it’s important not to lose our heads, or anyone else’s for that matter, and hope the trend continues to crawl forward.

It may not be exciting, but it’s a breath of fresh air.

We Brits are a hardy lot when it comes to drinking. Birthdays, Christmas, or just the end of a bland working week, taking our brains for a cut loose roller coaster ride is built in us like plumbing in an old house. But do we actually enjoy it as much as we convince ourselves we do?

Though no health, freak I recently found myself making heavy cut backs on old habits, I quit smoking, cut down on cannabis and reduced my alcohol consumption.

While trying to avoid spouting a holier than though mentality, I have found one new shining discovery from my quasi-Mormon standard of living… I don’t find many of these sun-down pastimes as much fun anymore.

I feel I should point out that my cut down hasn’t been to the point of tee-total from living like Richard E. Grant in Withnail And I. However growing up in a social family, drinking was regular and well practised within our circles. Being drunk is now an activity done halfheartedly every other month or so.

Getting merry with a few beers or indulging in some TV with a red eyed stare becomes more tedious the less i do it.
This has proved to be quite a double edged sword, while quite refreshing not to wake up hungover or forgetting my point mid sentence, it has also created a void where as a friend liked to put it ‘social lubrication’ once was.

Along with convincing friends and family that I’m not now a dreary old hermit, spending that new time proves to be one of the biggest challenges, what of ten on a Saturday night? what of free time with housemates? what of separating yourself from the rest of the week?
Filling previously redundant time is as much a frustrating task as an enjoyable one. I read more, I’m more organised, and often more productive. All were distant goals before the last nine months.

Getting drunk and high now often takes a strange turn when i decide to get stuck in. After the initial euphoria and dizziness for the first two hours, a lifelong lack of attention span means I find myself twiddling my thumbs, wandering what to do with myself.

Randy, the drunken delusional father of the Marsh household in South Park, sums up Cannabis use in a simple yet weirdly profound way: ‘Marijuana probably isn’t going to make you kill people and most likely wont fund terrorists, but… Pot makes you fine with being bored.’

To say having fun with drink and drugs makes you a lay-about or forever succumb to boredom is simply untrue. The late great Christopher Hitchens, a personal favourite, was as well known for his wit, writing skills and intellectual class as he was for his ability to consume booze. He is one among a long list of those who have found inspiration and escape enjoying what the god fearing would call ‘vices’.

However, most don’t sustain or possess The Hitch’s talents in sobriety, let alone when pissed or baked. And though I still enjoy a few beers or a huff on a joint, I look back and wonder what I could have achieved with vacant university hours other than papering over them with weed. as put by Mr Marsh, it did make me fine with being bored, even more so, it made me forget that I was bored.

While I don’t claim to have seen through the eye of the needle or anything so profound, I do feel as though I have taken a more objective look on my party potions and what they mean.

Drinking is not just legal across the world, but encouraged and applauded. Politicians grab press opportunities by awkwardly ‘grabbing a pint’ down a humble pub. (going the whole hog and spending an election campaign entirely shit-faced is more likely to grab the electorates support.)
Sports are filled with adverts just begging for us to get a skinful, birthday cards are decorated with champagne bottles and pubs are equipped with children’s play areas. Are we a nation, among others, that just throws caution to the wind and knows how to have a good time? Or have we done it so much that we immunised ourselves to the monotony of lighthearted liver workouts?

With the world gradually pulling back the wire fences of prohibition on Cannabis, and its consumption a far more normalised activity, will we see this relative new-comer walk hand-in-hand with our perception of alcohol? Or will the growing trend of health conscious millennials morph it into a more of a fair weather pursuit?

With a social life built on a foundation of booze and weed, trying to maintain it with sufficiently less of these substances continues to be a brain teaser. However I have come to realise that the boredom of spending a Saturday night pondering over how to fill the time, is more valuable than the persistent Saturday night memory mashers.
The monster of moderation that, in the past, I would have buried myself alive to avoid, does pose some challenges, but those challenges have at times proved to be entertaining and adjustable. The bottom line is, like a libido-less old married couple, I just don’t fancy it as much anymore.