Help!

We are fast being recognised as a good place to eat. Karen is turning out plate after plate of fine cuisine, but even with the help we have in the kitchen it is proving hard to keep up with the demand. We have prided ourselves on our ability to offer hot food seven evening a week, however, I am seriously considering shutting one evening a week until I can find additional trained staff. I have been advertising for a second chef, but so far no one is coming forward. I guess this is one of the downsides of being successful. It is all about balance. We have seen a drop off in lunchtime trade with the opening of the village cafe, this isn't necessarily a bad thing although

every little bit helps. It does allow more time for preparation of the evening menu. No one ever said it would be easy! We put pan fried bass fillet on the menu over the weekend and it sold out. Poor show really as I didn't even get a chance to eat any, still, think we have another delivery coming in today.

The East Prawle Cricket Team have announced their fixture list for the forthcoming season - see the links section on the right hand side of the blog.

Some of the characters I have referred to in previous postings are part of this team. I will provide match reports and details of their heroic on-field exploits (and some off-field) when available.

Curmudgeons R Us

Wyomissing is a borough in Pennsylvania, USA. It has a population of around 8,500 and boasts some marvellous scenery. In November 1965 it lost one of its inhabitants. Mr K. was dispatched to our shores, he says by his own volition, however I think he was banished for being too curmudgeonly. He now resides in East Prawle with his family, who I hasten to add are nothing other than friendly and nice to be around. Mr K. is like the voice in your head that never goes away. "Are you going to serve me or are you just going to stand there all expletive deleted night?" This may be followed by a pointed and equally barbed comment about the idea of a blog being something to do with posting on a regular basis - something I admit I fail to do! His voice buzzes around my head like an unwanted blue bottle. The only way I have found to soothe this savage beast is by serving him a fine single malt whisky. His current preference is Caol Ila (Gaelic for 'the Sound of Islay'). I must admit I have tried it and found it to be a fine wee dram. The smokey taste stays with you and it is very mellow as it slides down. Mr K. dispatches this nectar with relish and then insults me in a much friendlier fashion. You see, he has cultivated this image of being an old curmudgeon, but really he is quite a nice chap, although he will now abuse me to high heaven for suggesting as much. I look forward to his next broadside in anticipation.

Together At Last

Great news! Helen has secured a job here in the south west. She will be starting in May and at last i will have my family arond me. Sam, my oldest lad will continue to visit during his school holidays, but Max and Joe will be here full time with Helen. As I write this Helen is travelling down to the pub so that tomorrow morning we can visit Stokenham school nearby, to enrol Max.

I always thought the separation would be difficult, but now there is light at the end of the tunnel.

All I want to do now is arrange for my mother who is in here eighties to be able to come to the Provi' and see what all the fuss is about. She has doesn't walk or manage stairs so well these days, so staying in the pub or cottage would prove difficult. I am trying to find somewhere with facilities all on one level so that she can come for a weekend.

Things are on the up!

Provi' People

Things are running smoothly here in Prawle (I hope this statement won’t become known as my famous last words.) I have a set routine and with the odd exception of freezers breaking down, beer pumps not working properly and the one occasion where I ran out of wine, I am now finding time to plan ahead. We have the Easter break coming up soon and things here go mad. Busy is not a suitable description. It is full on all day and all night, a precursor of the summer to come? We are going to modify our menu and will attempt to encourage the ravenous hordes to book across two sittings. Also if the weather is good to us I will allow people to eat in the beer garden, where they can also enjoy a marvellous sea view.

We now have a regular clientele who use the Provi’ as a refuge from the drudgery of daily life in this village by the sea, a quiet and remote village with some of the most beautiful coastal scenery, a place where modern fast paced city life has no foothold... Sorry I was referring to drudgery wasn't I? Anyway, I now meet on a regular basis some very interesting characters. I’ll start by mentioning Tattoo Pete. Pete is a local fellow who spent time at sea and has also lived abroad in his time. He is also the only council employee I know who drives around in a Jaguar. I am reliably informed (and I have no personal knowledge of this) that he has tattoos over most of his body as well as several interesting piercings. I first met Pete when I was a customer rather than a landlord. My first impression was probably similar to most other peoples and decidedly wrong. Here was a thick-set chap with a goatee beard, tattoos all over him including his neck and ears. He had an earring that looks like a napkin ring in his earlobe and I mean in his earlobe, not just connected via a small pierced hole. Pete looks like he should be heading up a chapter of the most vicious Hell’s Angels you could encounter, but in truth he is a pussycat. He can be articulate, is very amusing and most importantly he is a nice bloke. It is quite funny when he is at the bar and a party of walkers enter the pub. You can see them exchange looks after they notice Pete and they obviously wonder if they have come to the right place. There is a scene in the Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood go into a very nice restaurant to try and persuade one of their old band members to rejoin them. The patrons look on with contempt at the two anti-heroes, looks of disgust across their collective faces. Jake turns to one table and in a rasping voice says, “I want to buy your daughters,” “How much for your daughters?” I intend to get Pete to do this at some point in the future. Never judge a book by its cover is a truism we should all remember.

I look forward to the visits of Mr & Mrs B. Mr B. is a multi talented chap who can do everything from manage the software requirements of local businesses to repair fairground organs. He is also a doyen of fine ale. Before we first took on the pub, we had a chat with a few locals and they made it clear that if Mr B. likes your beer then you are not doing too badly. Now, Mr B. knows that I know this and takes great delight as he takes his first sip of a pint in saying, “Landlord, there’s a problem with this beer!” I always look worried and he smiles his knowing smile following it up with, “This beer’s very good, I may have to have more.” He gets me with that every time! Mrs B. is a lovely lady and is definitely the Ying to Mr B’s Yang. Together they add to the charm of this place and I enjoy chatting to them on their frequent visits to the Provi’. Over time I will introduce you to more of my locals.

There are more interesting and colourful characters here and I will provide more information on these soon.

I have excellent staff here at the Provi’. The kitchen is managed by Karen tucker a local girl who has made a huge success of our food operation. She works like a Trojan and has given our customers a marvellous choice of mouth-watering dishes that keep them coming back for more. Alongside Karen is Ian another local who is fast becoming a kitchen whiz in his own right. He is our lunchtime specialist. The bar is my domain, but I wouldn’t manage without the help of Martin who comes from the nearby village of East Portlemouth. Martin helps out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and is a massive help during our busy times. I occasionally call on his assistance at lunchtimes, but this is not as easy for him as he educates his own children at home. So you see I am able to surround myself with erudite, colourful and intelligent people here at the Provi’.

BT - The enemy

So much for having a blog when you do not update it on a regular basis! So I am constantly reminded by one of my regular customers. In fairness, he is correct. I have been very remiss in providing you, my readers, with a sufficient level of output. I started this blog as a means to providing a cathartic journal for me to express my feelings about a major and significant change to my life. I took over a pub in a small Devon village and started to recount my exploits here on the web. Taking over the Providence Inn in December 2006 was a major gamble for my family and me too. So far, the gamble has paid off, but not without a few issues along the way. To date the single largest problem I have encountered is an organization that so many of us have the misfortune to deal with – British Telecom. Were anyone else to run their business in the same manner as this corporate abomination they would surely go to the wall through lack of custom and lack of efficiency. I am going to explain in detail what I have had to deal with. I am going to name names and I do not care if I upset anyone working for that organization.

We started here at the pub on the 1st December 2006. That same morning I contacted BT and was put through to the BT Local Business Department. I spoke to a very nice man called Roger Beech. I explained to Roger that I wanted to change the line at the pub to a BT account. The previous landlord had been using a different telecoms billing platform that I chose not to use. I explained this to Roger. The main reason, I said, was so that I could get a broadband enabled line. Oh, joy of joys! Roger was ecstatic. He explained that BT offer a service called BT FUSION. This service would provide me with my broadband requirement, it would also allow me to make internet based calls that would cost me no more than 0.05 pence per hour and best of all I would be able to use my mobile phone in the pub to receive and make calls, with the outgoing call cost being the same 0.05 pence per hour. Now, for all of you who live in or visit East Prawle, you will understand what a bonus that would be, as the only place in the village you can get a signal is outside the phone box on the village green. This sounded like a great scheme and I tentatively agreed to go ahead, but first I needed to make sure of certain things. In my previous employment, I had often run foul of BT, but this sounded quite straightforward. My biggest concern was that I had been using AOL Broadband at my previous address and had initially asked AOL to take over the account at the pub. I explained this process was going on as we spoke and Roger assured me that this detail, but good old Roger said that there would be no problem and that they, BT would sort out all of the finer points. With that, I said yes and he faxed through several forms for me to sign and return. The form filling duly completed I went about the business of becoming the new landlord of the Provi’.

I waited for a week and as no further contact had been made from BT, I thought I would contact my new friend Roger and check on the status of my order. My call went straight through to Roger’s voicemail, the message said he was in a meeting or away from his desk, but that was ok. I left a brief message and asked him if he would contact me and bring me up to date with the status of my order. Later that same day I realized that Roger had not called me, no problem really, after all he is a very busy man. I rang his number again and reached his voicemail, another message to call me and that was that. As you can probably appreciate, running a pub is a full on occupation and it was a day or two later that I remembered that he had not contacted me. I rang his number and got through to him on the first attempt. He apparently had not received my message? Somewhat surprised I asked him to let me know when I could expect to see the equipment necessary for my new shiny FUSION setup. He checked his system and was somewhat concerned to find a problem with line ownership existed. Apparently the line was still in the name of the previous landlord and therefore was not available for BT to upgrade. I explained that I had been present when the previous owner had contacted his supplier to cancel his contract and that furthermore I would not be using them. Roger was straight onto the case. He said I would have to contact the old landlord and check…. “No Roger!” “You will make the calls necessary, not me.” Anyway, after a while he rang me back and told me it was my fault! Apparently I had a broadband service from AOL. I quickly reminded dear Roger that during our very first conversation I had mentioned the AOL aspect and he had assured me that there would be no problem in changing the account and that he would sort the necessary details at his end and get back to me. A week passed and Roger had not contacted me. Had I upset my new friend? Was he ok? Perhaps he had been made Chief Exec of BT. I rang him and luckily only had to leave three messages before he called me back. He assured me that engineers were at that very minute en-route to switch the switches and make everything happen. Not wanting to rain on his parade I oohed and arrghed in the right places, but then had to remind him that I had not received any equipment to make things work at my end. Not to worry, we were all set for the Friday of that week and everything would be with me in time. I even received official BT paperwork confirming this. Friday morning arrived and the postman left me a few bills, but no router, software or mobile phone. Not to worry. I rang Roger and asked what courier service would be bringing my equipment. Now Roger sounded a little concerned, apparently he was due in a meeting and I was holding him up. I apologised profusely and reminded him that I was actually a customer and it was incumbent on him to help me in my hour of need. He suggested that he give me a number to ring, it was another BT department who are in charge of sending out the kit. Sorry Roger! That is a big no no. I am the customer; you work with your supply chain and find out the answer, then tell me what I need to know. In short nothing happened. As usual, he promised to get back to me and as usual he didn’t. The following week I tried on several occasions to speak to him as well as leaving messages, but by then he had given up on me. Now most companies have a contact number if you have a problem and I thought that it was perhaps time for me to utilise BT’s no doubt superior complaints system. I dialled a number and a very nice sounding recording gave me a choice of several numeric options – I pressed one, three, two, four, and three again and eventually was put in a queue. A young lady answered and I tried to explain my difficulties to her. She told me that I would have to go back on hold and that she would get back to me. Thirty four minutes later I gave up being on hold and had to open the pub for the evening session. I vowed to repeat the process on the Monday following. On the Monday I attempted a different tack. I contacted the number that was on the letter from BT Broadband and spoke to a chap in Mumbai. He was very helpful and explained that I couldn’t get the broadband connection because the line had not been enabled. Hang on! My old buddy Roger had assured me that the line would be changed over so surely Mumbai bloke must be wrong. I demanded to be put through to his supervisor without having to wait for an hour on hold. Amazingly I was put straight through to a Scottish sounding chap who promised to look into the situation and get straight back to me. I asked that he be true to his word as there was obviously a fault with the whole of the internal BT telephone network that normally stopped his colleagues from being able to return calls! He gave me his number and promised faithfully to get back to me. Within the hour he returned my call and explained that there was a tag on the line, “Well can’t you remove it?” I naively asked “I’m sorry Mr. Johnson, but we can’t do that. You have to ring 152 and ask them to do it.” Now I am all for helping where I can, but it seemed slightly unreasonable that I should have to make these calls, but in the interest of expediency I decided to do it. I made the call and asked for the line tag to be removed. I was informed that it would take a couple of hours and that everything would be sorted to my satisfaction. The week continued its steady course and no one had contacted me, no hardware had arrived and I was beginning to doubt my sanity. That Thursday in desperation I tried Roger again. He told me that he had done all he could and that it was in the hands of another BT department. Furthermore, he couldn’t contact them because government legislation prevented him from do so. That was it. I exploded into an apoplectic fit of rage and pointed out to this moron that he had prevaricated the whole time we had been in contact. He never returned calls and furthermore had provided me with no service whatsoever. As his customer I demanded that he sort this mess out or failing that get me put through to someone who could. After much bluster and buckets of bulls**t he finally gave me the number of another department who would sort out my issues. I contacted said department and spoke to a very helpful person who gave me an assurance that all would be sorted out by midday the following day. By the end of the following week I had a broadband connection and a router. I contacted the broadband department and explained that I thought there was a problem. Firstly I had not received my mobile, second, the router was fixed wire and surely for the mobile to work it needed to be a wireless router and finally, I had received a telephone bill that had local calls charged at 6.5 pence per minute and national at 7.5 pence per minute when in fact, good old Roger had told me I would be paying 5 pence per hour for all my calls. “I think you are mistaken Mr. Johnson.” My new BT friend told me. “We don’t provide that service.” Well, I explained in words of one syllable that he was somewhat mistaken as I was actually holding my copy of the contract that I had assiduously sent back to Roger on December 1st 2006. It stated that I was signing up for broadband and something called Fusion that would provide all the facets of this wonderful service. “Let me guess, that is provided by another part of BT and you want me to ring them?” Sometime around this point my eyes glazed over and I lost the will to live. I estimate that BT employs in excess of 5000 staff. I think during this process I have spoken to 4998 of them the remaining two being the Chief Exec and the one person who might have been able to sort out my difficulties. I cannot be bothered to bore you with more details, but in short it is March 17th I am on my third router, I have my third mobile and surprisingly I still do not have the service I am paying for. I wish a plague on BT and all its offshoots. I have no contact with Roger Beech although if you ever want to contact him I will gladly give you his number. Every moment I am not serving beer I am in dialogue with BT employees who seem at a loss as to what is happening. So you see the lack of blogging is not really down to me as the blame lies with British Telecom. As was pointed out to me the other day, BT stands for Bunch of Tossers.

My promise to you is that very shortly you will start to see regular posting about my pub adventure,

For The Benefit of Mr Keltz.

Don't worry about the title and I'm happy to pay due deference to the Beatles for the abuse - he

knows what it means...

Sorry, it has been a while now I know. I’ve been surprised at just how busy I am, don’t get me wrong folks, it’s great, but time just flies by and before you know it another week has passed. The pub is doing rather well. The local villagers are very supportive and the Euchre team have been a blessing with their home matches here at the Provi’. The food has really taken off now and we are getting lots of diners in. Karen Tucker is working wonders in the kitchen with a varied and appetising menu. She really knows how to cook that girl, her food is getting recognised in other villages and we are receiving lots of bookings based on recommendations made by previous diners. The biggest problem is staff. We are desperately in need of a second chef, but can we get one? That’s a big no at the moment.

I have also acquired a new role for myself. I am now the East Prawle correspondent for the Kingsbridge & Salcombe Gazette. I have made a couple of submissions to the paper already and have the honour of having my ugly mug pasted at the top of my weekly musings. On Monday evening this week I attended a meeting of the Prawle Fair Committee. Each year the village holds a fair to raise funds for the Community Hall that sits next to my pub. I sat in the hall and thought back to what I was doing last year at that time. I decided that I was either sitting in my old home watching a football match on the TV or possibly doing some telecom related work. Yet there I was on the 26/02/07 listening to a serious discussion about the best way to hold a guinea pig race! Welcome to Planet Prawle.

Tomorrow evening the village cricket team are playing a darts match against a team from the Pig’s Nose. The Pig’s Nose is the other pub in the village and it is famous for its music evenings some very well known bands play there. I just hope their darts aren’t as good as their music.

I am getting to know various people in the village and whilst they are a diverse bunch, they are also a very warm and welcoming group of souls (as long as the beer is okay.) I really enjoy their company especially when a heated argument is on the go. More often than not it is about local and national politics but on occasion it can be caused by a stupid townie asking a dumb question about foot and mouth disease. (With apologies to Tim, Richard, Sarah, Shawn, David, Louise, Julian and Brian.)

Helen and the boys came down last weekend and we took Charlie for his first walk out in the big wide world. We went to Lannacombe beach which is close to East Prawle. The beach sits at the foot of a valley and all the rain water that runs down and from the valley cuts through the beach and runs out to sea. Well, just lately we have had a large amount of rain and as a result the stream was flowing very fast. I crossed at a shallow point and Charlie dutifully followed. Now, shallow is a subjective term. I am five feet ten inches tall, Charlie is approximately ten inches tall, and I guess the extra five feet can make a difference. When he surfaced he looked quite surprised in the way that only puppies can. I must admit, I found it hilarious as he paddled, flapped his ears and tried anything he could think of to get out of the water. His tail acted as a rudder and he floated by my feet looking totally confused. We got him back to the pub soon after and he seemed fine despite his aquatic adventure.

I am really looking forward to Helen joining me on a permanent basis here in Prawle. She makes the journey every weekend and considering her New Year’s Day exploits she doesn’t complain, but it is hard going. Our Sunday lunch time sessions are usually a nice time, but I dread the clock reaching three o’clock as that is the time that she and the boys go home.

More soon….