A somewhat ambivalent reintroduction to the world of hotel stays. The first since February 2020, but before these lockdowns, a common part of our retirement lives. Probably 3 or 4 stays per annum, more if you include the traditional Irish holiday. Of these two contradictory factors it was the absence of stays rather than the frequency that seemed to bear most heavily on how we felt about this one. That’s rather a puzzling sentence but never mind I know what I mean.
Perhaps it was a mistake to choose for this first visit probably the poshest hotel on our list. This was The Devonshire Arms at Bolton Abbey. There are 5 options in the Devonshire ‘chain’ and I’m thinking this is the most expensive, the grandest you might say although to be honest we’ve only stayed in 3 of the 5.
So what is my point? Well, simply that after lockdown I suppose that part of the pleasure of staying in a hotel, albeit only for one night, is the feeling of re-joining the world or dare I say, at least a sense of re-joining one’s tribe.
I’ve written about finding my tribe or rather not finding it, a couple of times in this retirement blog. I may even have said that I had trouble with this idea even before I retired. My job in my working days as an educational psychologist, was not particularly clubbable. You were pretty much out there on your own with your school visits. Unlike teaching which was what I did before I retrained. That was definitely clubbable – every morning, break times, lunchtime and after school there was always somebody in the staff room to chat to.
But being an educational psychologist was different. It wasn’t that you didn’t make friends from among your colleagues, a couple anyway, but if you gathered with all your colleagues in a group for some sort of professional get together I didn’t look at them and think, these are my people, my tribe. Even the profession itself often had the effect of alienating me rather than embracing me. But this is another story for another time.
I don’t quite know what I expected when I did retire. Probably not very much. I certainly did not expect to take pleasure in belonging to the group known as retirees. And I got that much right about retirement. Not much else but I did hit that nail on the head.
Perhaps this should have been a surprise because, as we know, one strategy that retired people embrace is to join something – a club, an interest group, a support group, something like that. The focus may vary but the important thing was that you were associating with like-minded people of roughly the same age.
Not me though. I have made a couple of stabs at doing so, the most successful of which has probably been my jazz group. But even here, in this most successful of my joining gestures, I have never looked around me and thought ah, yes, these are indeed my people.
So why then was it a shock (almost) to rock up at The Devonshire Arms and think, bloody hell, is this what we’ve waited all this time for? As I observed their transport in the car park – brand new Bentleys, Jags, Range Rovers even Aston Martins I thought hmm not sure about this. Our battered old Defender may have felt uncomfortable in this company but I’d hope that it presented as the real deal unlike, it thought, you nobs.
Then I met their owners in person in the lounge or dining room / restaurant and I knew for a fact that I did not belong here with them. If they weren’t sitting in their cars they were braying on about them. Even the new Defender which hurt a bit I have to say. That said when Mrs SH asked whether I thought the locals in our pub near the vineyard were our tribe I said no without hesitation. So no comfort in either extreme.
We sat next to an elderly pair of ‘them’ in the restaurant and asked if they minded dogs (they were with us). She replied, he hates them. We asked to be moved and got a far better table as a result and an explanation – ‘don’t mind her, she’s got dementia,’ the maitre-d said in a wonderfully broad Yorkshire accent. ‘Don’t take it personal’. Which indeed we did not as we were now sitting in a much better spot.
But while we’re on the food and drink, we got all out of our rhythm with our eating and drinking. And this didn’t help my feeling of belonging. Wine and a proper meal at lunchtime (always a mistake) and then a late dinner (we usually eat about 3.30 not 6.30 / 7.00). Then a full Yorkshire breakfast purely on the grounds that we’d paid for it (a lot) so I was bloody well going to eat it. Mrs Summerhouse was more sensible with her choice but such was my mind-set. I can’t imagine the posh nobs feeling that way. More fool me, you say and you’d be right.
So our first hotel stay after lockdown won’t go down as an unmitigated success. And when it was done and we were driving away, in our characterful Land Rover, Defender who was heard to say, Thank God we’re off, what a bunch of tossers, my feeling was more one of relief at having got the first visit out of the way rather than, we spent a lot of money but it was worth every penny. A real pleasure.
It’s so good to be out of lock-down and back in the real world, should have been my thinking but instead it was more akin to, I think I’ll just crawl back in my little hole and live my own version of retirement life.
PS Since leaving the hotel I’ve had three emails asking for our feedback on our visit. They obviously want us to feel a part of the tribe even if we don’t. I’m not sure what I’ll say to them about the visit. The hotel was fine, it’s us that’s a bit weird.