IN HIS travel book “Notes from a Small Island”, Bill Bryson, an American writer, describes his first brush with English hospitality. Arriving in Dover from Calais in 1973, he envisioned a hearty welcome at a small hotel on the beachfront. Instead he found somewhere that treated him as a horrible inconvenience. There were rules for everything, including when he was allowed to run a bath or turn on the heating in his room. He was lectured about the importance of wiping his feet when arriving and was told he would have to give notice if he was expecting a phone call. No sooner had he checked in than the proprietor, one Mrs Smegma, told him he had to leave for the day: guests, she explained, were not permitted in the hotel between breakfast and 4pm. The difference in cultures left him dumbfounded: “Where I came from, you got a room in a motel, spent ten hours making a lavish and possibly irredeemable mess of it, and left early the next morning,” he wrote. “This was like joining the army.”
