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Cooking is my hobby and I love cooking different meals, dinner parties especially are my speciality.  Today I'm doing Braised Partridge, Salmon Filo Pie and a good Veggie option.  I've got some Pink Fir Apple potatoes just delivered from Riverford Organic along with Cavalo Nero and a whole load of other goodies.
Anyone for dinner?

Hotels are a microcosm of all that happens in daily life, peopled as they are by everyone from every walk of life, and as such they lurch from crisis to crisis, incident to incident. We have our fair share.  Sometimes more than our fair share.  Our office computer blew up yesterday, not literally of course; but suddenly plagued by instant, annoying pop ups appearing every other second every time I logged on to a browser I tried to clean up the computer using a downloaded tool for the job, and ended up losing windows 7 off the system altogether. There was no way back into it, in safe mode, last working mode or any other mode so we had to cart it off to a repair shop and just hope we can retrieve our data.
 It's a battle every Saturday night trying to get people to go home when they've been drinking.  We ask them to leave but they won't. They just want to sit in a warm space talking when we just want to shut the door, get on with the jobs we have to do like cleaning the beer lines, cleaning the bar etc, and prevent any noise from disturbing our hotel guests.
The Comedy Club of last weekend was a good one and we're undecided about whether to carry on.  We don't get much support from the locals and perhaps it's not something they want to support but it seems a shame that we can't introduce something new and more adventurous into the town.

Events and staff leavings news

We've had quite a week. 3 people on holiday, another staff member unavailable and on Sunday Emily left.  Emily came in to see us just before setting off for Kingston on Thames to resume her creative writing course and left us an amazing testimonial.  We'll really miss her. She was instrumental in setting up the poetry events here and getting Gordon motivated to write again, and although poetry has only a minority following is important nontheless.  Just before last week's evening with a theme of 'Spiders' Gordon penned the following limerick.
There was an old spider called Bruce
who spotting a fly buzzing loose
said "you're looking much thinner
so please come to dinner
and I'll let you swing on my noose."
Saturday the 22nd we hosted the 60th birthday party of Nigel Spencer. It was really well attended
by family and friends and I believe everyone  had a thoroughly good time.  All 7 siblings compiled a
film of Nigel's life so far. It marked the end of Tamsin's summer at the hotel and Meghann's 2 year
stint working here part-time whilst at 6th form college. Now they're both back to University and we're
already missing them, because that's in addition to those mentioned in the first paragraph..  What a week!
We're on the lookout now for bright, enthusiastic replacements.

This week at the Conti

This week we had 2 events, on Thursday night we had Poetry which was a great success, everyone sat in the restaurant and recited poems they had written themselves or ones they liked, there is always a great atmosphere and it's a jolly good laugh and Becky the chef made a lovely spread for everyone.

On Sunday we had our monthly Open Mic night, which is organised by Michael this is where anyone can turn up between the times of 7.30pm and 11.00pm and play music of their choice, this has been building up to be a really fantastic night, we hold an open Mic Night every month on a sunday evening so please check our Twitter feed for the next event.

We have recently finished the renovations of Room 10, which used to be a Double room and now is a Twin, it is very cosy with a light coloured decor, it's almost as if you are floating in the clouds. It has a walk in bathroom with a corner bath and shower unit.

Corner Bath and shower Unit

Come fly with me

Walk in bathroom

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