Grand Hotel

My accommodation for my brief return to Edinburgh is very grand indeed. The Balmoral is part of the 'Rocco Forte Collection'. The name Forte rang a distant bell: the last time I had any dealings with Forte hotels was when I worked for Rocco's father as a dishwasher before going up to university.

The service in the hotel is creepily obsequious, some of it replete with Glengarries, kilts and capes: this level of servitude is probably what most people pay for, I suppose, but it does not have the desired effect on me. On arrival, a flunkey spent quite a few minutes apologising that the general manager was not immediately available to shake my hand. He was still wringing his hands and lamenting when I got into the lift. Surprised it wasn't hand cranked for my personal satisfaction.

When I got back to the hotel after dinner with Davide Messina, there was a message on the answerphone from, guess who, the general manager, apologising for not having been there to shake my hand.

Later on, when just getting relaxed, there was an insistent knocking on the door. Another flunkey was desperate to turn down the coverlet on the bed. I fobbed him off by deigning to accept his personalised printout of the weather forecast for the next morning.

Once in the room it took me a while to guess where the noise of an Airbus taking off was coming from: when I had inserted the electronic keycard into the slot, all the systems came on, along with every conceivable light, the monumental telly etc.. Turns out the airconditioning unit, which was on full-blast, could probably run to cooling a supermarket in the tropics. That level of capacity could be really useful in Edinburgh, particularly in January. Maybe foreign guests are comforted by the noise, which they take as a familiar sign of a well run hotel. Finding the off switch took some time, but the relief when the noise stopped was a bliss worth waiting for.